Xu Wei's poems and paintings are all extraordinary talents, with novel techniques and strange ideas, but they are all nuanced, which makes people admire them. This poem seems to be a painting poem, the title is ink grapes, but when I started writing, I was not writing grapes, but writing my own state. I am down and out, old and old, and I can't do my best to contribute to the court. I had to follow the example of celebrities in Wei and Jin Dynasties and express my grievances. In the third issue, I cleared my mind, and there was nowhere to sell the pearl at the bottom of the pen. I'm not talking about pearls, but my talent is not satisfied. He said that the pearls he painted were not wanted, so he had to replace them with black grapes in wild vines. The sharp contrast between pearls and black grapes makes readers deeply moved by his situation, and the last sentence naturally comes down to the topic, ink grapes. This technique seems to be an understatement, but all the articles are laughing and cursing, which is very clever.
In his later years, Xu Wei made a living by selling paintings, but never painted for the ruling bureaucrats. "There were thousands of books, but they were all sold out. It's not easy to break the law. It's time to borrow a manuscript to sleep. He often "wanders alone under the moon". Dumen thanked the guests, and only when he died did he go to the Zhang family to pay his respects and almost never leave home. Finally, he ended his 73-year-old life in the case of "several staggered rooms and one diversion". Only a dog accompanied him before he died, and there was not even a cushion on the bed, which was terrible.
From this poem, we can also see Xu Weining's noble integrity of casting pearls before swine and not working for the feudal class.