Since the middle and late Tang Dynasty, poetry has been developing in the direction of poetic beauty, obscurity and closeness.
Li Shangyin's poems have many artistic achievements. Famous works such as Two Feelings (Five Elements) are heavy and gloomy; Han Bei (Seven Ancient Dynasties) is vigorous and lofty; The writing style of "preparing for duty" (seven laws) was frustrated; The poem of the proud son (five ancient times) is similar to the sketch of characters; Han Shu (Five Laws) in the Year of the Horse in Shu has the style of ancient poetry. In the bold exercise of "I Turn into a Rhyme and Give Four Roommates Seventy-two Sentences" (seven ancient poems), I saw deep affection, and so on, each with its own characteristics and great skills. However, judging from the evolution of the history of poetry, his lyric poems, especially untitled poems, and poems with styles close to untitled, such as Jinse, Re-entry into the Palace and Spring Rain, deserve special attention for their artistic achievements and innovative significance. Li Shangyin's position in the history of literature largely depends on the great and lasting influence produced by such works.
Before Li Shangyin, Han Meng and Bai Yuan flourished in the middle Tang Dynasty. By the late Tang Dynasty, the emotional content of Han Yu's poems and Bai Juyi's poems had gradually divorced from the mentality of literati, and the strange and increasingly fierce Han poetry and Bai Juyi's simple and implicit brushwork were no longer suitable for expressing delicate feelings. In the middle and late Tang Dynasty, Li He's magnificent and mysterious painting style opened the trend of paying attention to soul and self in the late Tang Dynasty. After that, there are three noteworthy trends in poetry creation: first, the growth of love and the richness of themes, and the melody of Qi and Liang gradually sneaked back to the Tang Dynasty poetry circle; Second, pursue exquisite beauty; Third, pay attention to subjectivity and the expression of spiritual world. These three aspects are manifested from different aspects, and they are internally related. Love and rich and meticulous spiritual activities often go hand in hand, and the expression of love and spiritual world needs to be beautifully written. Driven by this trend, Li Shangyin has made great progress in expressing the spiritual world, including love experience, and at the same time created the poetic beauty of "Mickey Returning to Words" (Aoqi's poetry review).
The artistic conception beauty of Li Shangyin's lyric poems. He devoted himself to the experience, grasp and reappearance of emotions, mostly delicate things to express his feelings. Expressed in a subtle and circuitous way, not only the emotions of untitled poems are multi-layered, but even other poems are often filled with a heavy emotion, showing a deep and ethereal expression, such as Spring Rain:
When spring comes, I wear a coat with a white lining, but I only think about the white gate city where I can't go. There are two red mansions facing the cold, covered by rain, and a pearl curtain lamp shakes my lonely heart and goes home. The long road ahead will be full of new difficulties, in the middle of the night, the interval of short dreams. Oh, I'm sending you this message, these jade earrings! ? I saw a lonely goose in a cloud three thousand miles away.
Feeling "disappointed", "lonely" and "against one's will" about the departure of the loved one is a layer of emotion; Entering the scene of being alone in the rain is another layer of emotion; Imagine each other's sadness on the long road, which is a layer of emotion; After waking up, I returned to the environment, feeling that my dream was blurred and it was another layer of emotion; Then there is the melancholy that letters are difficult to reach. Thoughts go back and forth, winding and circling. The images such as rain, lamp shadow and pearl foil are beautiful, light and ethereal, and the artistic conception is hazy and confused, which makes the poetic scene look sad.
Different from ordinary poets, Li Shangyin reveals the focus, depth, breadth and state of emotional content as clearly as possible in a predictable, measurable and comparable way. In order to express complex contradictions and even inexplicable emotions, he is good at turning hazy images in his mind into poetic images. These images are obviously symbolic, but it is difficult to guess what they symbolize. They are structured as poems, omitting the clear expression of logical relations, thus forming a hazy poetic realm with elusive meaning. Such as "Jinse":
I want to know why my Jinse has fifty strings, and each string has a youthful interval. Zhuangzi daydreaming, a saint, was bewitched by butterflies, and cuckoo crowed in the imperial spring. Mermaids shed pearl-like tears on the moon-green sea, and the blue fields breathed their jade to the sun. A moment that should last forever has come and gone before I know it.
This poem presents some images that seem to exist but are not true, although they are not true, they are clearly visible: Zhuang Sheng dreams of butterflies, Du Fu cries blood, good jade produces smoke, and tears in the sea. What these images constitute is not a complete picture, but a sense of frustration, sadness, loneliness, yearning and disappointment interwoven in it, which is a mental image full of these feelings. The realm of poetry transcends the limitation of time and space, and there is no longer a boundary between truth and illusion, between ancient and present, between soul and external things. What exactly are you writing? Only the beginning and end of couplets vaguely hint at the feeling of recalling the New Year, and the content of conveying feelings is five metaphors that are not necessarily related logically and the confused and sentimental feelings used to run through these five metaphors. The carrier itself is hazy to varying degrees, but the ontology does not appear, so poetry naturally constitutes a multi-level hazy realm, which is difficult to understand.
The obscurity of Li Shangyin's poems is often combined with intimate and sensible emotional images. Although it is difficult for readers to understand the ideological content of the poem "Jinse", it is easy to see a poetic scene for wandering in their minds. Therefore, although "Jinse" is difficult to understand, it is a household name and widely read. The famous sentence in "Re-crossing the Temple of Notre Dame": "The spring dream often rains, and the spirit can't satisfy the flag all day long" describes the desolate and lonely situation of the Virgin "falling late", which is regarded as "the meaning is still unfinished" (Lv Benzhong's Wei Zi Poetry). The barren hills are deserted, the drizzle is like a dream, and the spiritual wind seems to be intimate, but that kind of spirit is not a spirit, which has vague hopes, illusory emotional hints and fascination. It seems that there is something hidden, which is difficult to confirm.
Li Shangyin's untitled poems are vague in realm, emotional in thought and often vague in connotation. There are many lawsuits in a piece of Jinse. All kinds of notes seem within reach. The so-called "endless flavor, the stronger it is baked, the inexhaustible." This phenomenon shows the polysemy of Li Shangyin's poems, which can be appreciated and interpreted from many aspects.
Polysemy is very common in China's classical poems, which can be caused by metaphors, symbols, allusions, hints, feelings after words and intentions in sentences. However, one polysemous word is easy to solve, while the other is difficult to solve. Li Shangyin belongs to the latter. The former is often manifested in some images with symbolic meaning or deep meaning hidden under the surface meaning. Although there are many meanings, most of them belong to the extension and deepening of extension. However, Li Shangyin's polysemy often provides readers with the possibility of multiple interpretations, which constitutes polysemy in interpretation. Multiple meanings can be relatively close or divergent.
The fuzziness of Li Shangyin's poems is related to the uniqueness of his images. The images used by ordinary poets are objective and can be perceived in the usual way. Li's poetic images are full of unrealistic colors, such as beads and tears, jade smoke, Pengshan, Jade Bird, Caifeng, Linxi, Yaotai and Lingfeng. It's hard to be true. This image has been spiritualized by Li Shangyin, which is a combination of various experiences. Their production mainly comes not from the outside, but from the heart, and their connotation is far more complicated than ordinary images.
Shi Li used many allusions. Due to the concentration of connotation, allusions can contain rich and multi-level content in a limited sentence if used well. Li Shangyin is also good at multiplying and transforming the connotation of allusions, and his allusions are also unique. He often pays attention to the emotional charm conveyed or implied by the original code, without the reason of the original code. "Zhuangzi daydreaming, a saint, was bewitched by Butterfly". The original canon was only to illustrate the idea that everything is with me, but Li Shangyin put aside the philosophical thinking of the original canon and introduced a thick layer of confusion and sadness into the life born from the dreamy original canon. "Wang Di Chun Xin Du Fu Tiao" also introduces the feeling of hurting spring from the original sadness. These allusions are not used to express a specific meaning, but to convey emotions. The associations and * * * sounds caused by emotional feelings can be varied. Li Shangyin's life was bumpy, and he had full feelings about the contradiction and complexity of things. Combining his own experience and understanding, he often turned the canon into the opposite of the original story, from positive to negative, positive to negative contrast, which greatly expanded the angle and space of people's ideological activities. For example, Chang 'e:
The mica screen was dyed red by thick candles, and the Milky Way gradually tilted towards the morning star. Chang 'e, I must regret eating the elixir, and now I am alone, in the blue sky, singing every night.
Chang 'e took the elixir of life and became a fairy in the Moon Palace, which is the envy of ordinary people. Li Shangyin had many lofty pursuits in his life, but he ended up living in a lonely situation. He has studied aisles and is familiar with the lonely life of a female Taoist. Based on these feelings and experiences, he assumed that Chang 'e would regret stealing the elixir because of the loneliness in the sky. The annotator speculates on the theme of the poem, indicating that after the allusions are reversed, the quiet environment and eternal loneliness convey some similar psychology of different types of characters, so that the poem can be interpreted from different angles. There are also some allusions, although not used in reverse, but the poet made a unique germinal, such as: "Dream Ze sad wind moves white grass, the king of Chu was buried all over the city." I don't know how much singing and dancing can do, but I can slim the palace kitchen to a thin waist. "(Dream Ze) asked about the benefits of reducing meals from the aspect of" how many things can be done by singing and dancing ",which led to various explanations such as" I deeply care about the ignorance and numbness of those who love beauty in the palace "and associations such as" everyone in the world imitates those who cry after reading this ". It can be seen that the allusion of the king of Chu's love for thin waist has produced an ambiguous effect through germination.
The polysemy of Li's poems is also closely related to the unique image combination in his poems. The poet's mental load is heavy, his spirit turns inward, and his inner experience is extremely delicate and sensitive. When his mind is touched by the outside world, all kinds of mental images will emerge. Poetry often has intricate images, which are not limited by time and space and causal order in real life. The ellipsis and interval caused by this image transformation and jumping need readers to connect and supplement through artistic association. If there is no title:
The purple fairy is a treasure lamp, and the cloud slurry has not been drunk into ice. How to have a bright night in a snowy month, but also on the twelfth floor of Yaotai?
There is a great emotional jump between images and sentences. As a narrative, it is really incredible, but in confusion and loss, people may have similar mental images and hallucinations in their hearts. As a psychological image, the link changes before and after, and the cloud slurry turns into ice immediately without drinking, which is an illusion of unsuccessful pursuit. The sentence "how" is a feeling far away from the object of pursuit, and the jump in the middle reveals that the other party is elusive and difficult to catch up with. All this is not only understandable, but also a sense of confusion caused by various incentives (such as falling in love, making friends and being an official). Because there are multiple incentives for the emergence of poetry itself, readers have their own feelings and artistic associations in the face of the leaping changes of images, so there will be polysemy in interpretation.
The more fundamental reason for the ambiguity of Li Shangyin's poems is that he takes the spiritual world as the object of expression. Many poems describe not only a moment, but the whole state of mind, and his state of mind is very complicated. His persistent concern for politics has enabled his spiritual realm to be explored in the rise and fall of the world, the universe, history and chaos, but in real life, various troubles are entangled in his heart. Specifically, the decline of the times, the decline of family background, the frustration of official career and love, Hu Ling's ignorance of current affairs, the early death of his wife Wang, etc., all increased his psychological load. All kinds of emotions are interrelated and permeated with each other, so it is difficult to distinguish them. This state of mind, when expressed by complex images, cannot be clearly explained by a certain time, place or thing. At the beginning of the poem "Jinse", it is pointed out that "fifty strings are for no reason", which shows that there are different ideas. Judging from its multi-level hazy state and strong feelings of disappointment, confusion and sadness, it is by no means a temporary event that can make the author fall into such a state of mind. To solve it with a specific incident, it is inevitable to hang a leak and not see one thing clearly. "Jinse" is like this, and there is a similar phenomenon in untitled poems. The poet expressed an inexplicable sadness that haunted his mind. He probably didn't fully understand its context, so the poem was named Untitled without a proper title. Most of these chapters can only be regarded as the embodiment of the whole mood centered on love experience. Such as "Four Untitled Poems":
You said you would come, but you didn't. You didn't leave me any other trace, except the moonlight on your tower at five o'clock. I cried for you and left forever. I couldn't wake up. I tried to read your hasty notes, and I found the ink was too pale. The layering of residual jade is hazy; Musk smoked through the tulle, soft. In those days, Liu Lang had long complained that the mountain was far away; You go to more places than the mountains in Shashaling!
The whole article is about the hero's feeling of missing each other after waking up. But the disappointment of "empty talk" and "no trace to be found" in earnest expectation, the feeling of parting that has been farther away from Pengshan, has Li Shangyin not experienced it again and again in the process of career pursuit and communication with friends? Therefore, the melancholy mood of hope and disappointment expressed in the poem is not simply caused by the frustration of love.
Some of Li Shangyin's poems, although moved by a moment's events, still focus on the context, expressing feelings or emotions rather than meaning, and the connotation far exceeds the specific plot. Le Garden Scenic Area: "I am driving in the graves of Le Garden with the shadow of dusk. To see the sun, for all his glory, buried by the coming night. " The poem "Overlooking the Sunset" by Deng Guyuan triggered the whole soul's bet, with mixed feelings and an instant intersection. The emotion in the poem can only be summarized by the word "discomfort", and the reason and connotation of discomfort almost converge his feelings and experiences of life experience.
Because performance is often not limited to specific situations, it is a complex emotional world and a variety of life experiences; Therefore, all kinds of misunderstandings about Li Shangyin's poems may be merged at a higher level. From the perspective of multi-faceted and multi-level poetic context, some reasonable elements in communication theory may be closer to the original. For untitled poems, the general reader does not need to delve into their "skills", but only needs to grasp their overall emotional connotation to appreciate their poetry and poetic beauty.