Han Dynasty is the founding period of Yuefu poetry, and Yuefu poetry has made great achievements. Even if we say Yuefu poetry today, it mainly refers to Han Yuefu. Yuefu in the Han Dynasty, no matter the meaning of the title or the artistic technique, especially its writing spirit of facing reality, was absorbed by later poems and became a model for later writers to learn, which had a great influence.
I Yuefu and Yuefu Poems
To understand Yuefu poetry, we must first understand what Yuefu is. Yuefu originally refers to the official government in charge of music, and its setting can be traced back to the pre-Qin period. 1977 The word "Yuefu" was cast on the chime unearthed near the mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor. Han inherited the Qin system and set up a special Yuefu institution. Shi Zaihui has the post of "Yuefu Order". By the time of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, the scale and functions of Yuefu organization had been greatly expanded, and the specific tasks included making music scores, training musicians, collecting folk songs, writing lyrics and so on. The music used in court ceremonies such as "Music in the Room" in the early Western Han Dynasty and "Song of Sacrifice to the Suburb" in the middle Western Han Dynasty were mainly written by literati. The songs sung on ordinary occasions are mainly folk songs collected from all over the country. The music used mainly comes from the folk, and some from the western regions. This kind of poem sung with music is Yuefu, which was called "Song Poetry" in Han Dynasty and "Yuefu" only after Wei and Jin Dynasties. During the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, literati wrote poems with the old theme of Yuefu, such as Cao Cao, but the content did not necessarily follow the old poems completely. Whether you like it or not, it's called Yuefu. In the Tang Dynasty, there appeared poems that imitated some features of Yuefu poems without using the old themes of Yuefu, which were called "New Yuefu" or "Bu Yuefu". For example, Bai Juyi and Yuan Zhen both created new Yuefu. After the Song and Yuan Dynasties, "Yuefu" was another name for Ci and Qu. As a branch of poetry, these two styles are also closely related to music. They were originally sung by music, so they are called "Yuefu".
The Yuefu poems in the Western Han Dynasty have been handed down to this day, such as The Song of An Shi Fang and The Song of Sacrifice to the Suburb, but most of the 100 folk songs recorded in the Records of Han Shu Literature and Art have been lost. Yuefu poems in the Eastern Han Dynasty were still circulated inside and outside the imperial court after the Wei and Jin Dynasties. During the Six Dynasties, some literary collections included ancient Yuefu poems with Han Yuefu as the main body, such as Yutai New Poems. Shen Yue compiled The Book of Song Dynasty, which included a large number of Han Yuefu. In Song Dynasty, Guo Maoqian compiled Yuefu Poetry, which is a collection of Yuefu poems in past dynasties. Yuefu Poems are divided into twelve categories: Jiaomiao Ci, Ci, Advocacy Ci, Transverse Blowing Ci, Harmony Ci, Ci, Dance Ci, Qin Ci, Miscellaneous Ci, Modern Style Ci, Miscellaneous Ci and New Yuefu Ci, including Jiaomiao Ci, Advocacy Ci and Harmony Ci in Han Yuefu. "Jiaomiao" is a kind of court ceremony music written by literati, while folk songs are mainly preserved in three categories: harmony, advocacy and miscellaneous songs, especially in the category of harmony, which is a kind of orchestral music with harmony between silk and bamboo and also the main folk music in Han Dynasty. "Music worship" is a military music formed by absorbing northern national music during the period of Emperor Wu of Han Dynasty. Zaqu is a work with unclear classification of the original music.
Second, the content and art of Han Yuefu
Ban Gu's Records of Han Shu Literature and Art describes Yuefu poems in the Western Han Dynasty, which is summarized as "feeling sad and happy, starting from something". This is a very pertinent and incisive comment, especially on the folk songs and lyrics of the Han Yuefu Dynasty.
As far as the content of Yuefu poetry is concerned, its "feeling of sadness and joy, starting from things" mainly reflects the real social life and individual life experience of the lower class in an all-round and profound way, paying special attention to reflecting the hardships and pains of their lives, thus revealing the sharpness of social contradictions. Yuefu poems not only show social injustice and the evils of war, but also pay attention to personal emotional world, especially the joys and sorrows of love and the experience of life and death. Compared with the Book of Songs, Yuefu poems reveal more common social problems. Compared with Qu Yuan's works, Yuefu poems reflect a deeper and broader level of life.
Revealing social contradictions, especially social injustice, is the most important part of Han Yuefu poetry. For example, Gynecology recorded a terrible scene, which seemed ordinary but full of blood and tears. My wife has been ill for many years, but she has no money to treat her illness. Now she is going to die, leaving her husband alone. After his wife died, her husband lived a miserable life and begged in the street. "I want to be sad, I can't!" "When I got home, I didn't know that the child had died of Anemarrhena asphodeloides, but' beg his mother for a hug'. After reading it, people can't help but feel infinite sympathy. At the same time, Yuefu poetry also records the extravagant life of the upper class of society. For example, Meet describes a wealthy family with "two or three brothers and neutron as assistant minister". Gold is the door, white jade is the hall, and wine is placed in the hall, which is famous. Osmanthus trees in the atrium, bright lights, cranes humming, the cost of honeymoon, two women who weave cotton, and a little woman who plays musical instruments. Comparing the poems such as Gynecological Diseases and East Gate, people feel that society is unfair.
The Han Dynasty was a dynasty with frequent wars. No matter the invasion of barbarians or the opening of Huang Wu's borders, the wars continued. The pain brought by war is not only hunger, cold and vagrancy, but also the destruction of people. For example, in the Tenth Five-Year Plan, a soldier was drafted, and his family suffered a tragic change. He joined the army all his life, but he was alone in his later years. In his eighties, he retired and returned to his hometown. He is also looking forward to reuniting with his family and enjoying a short family life in his later years. However, when he got home, his hopes were dashed. "Looking ahead, it is the royal family, with many pines and cypresses." "Rabbits enter from dogs and pheasants fly from beams. The atrium was born in Hanggu and the inoue was born in sunflower. " And the phrase "the soup has been cooked for a while, and I don't know who it will be" also makes readers feel the despair and helplessness of this ruined veteran. The Battle of the South reveals the tragic war through the appearance of the dead. "Call me Wu:' And a guest! If the wild is dead and dare not bury, can the carrion escape? ""there are a few words that are particularly amazing. Died in the battlefield, the bones were not buried, and the grief was unbearable, so I begged in Ukraine, which made people surprised and sad.
There are also many poems expressing personal emotional world in Han Yuefu, which are straightforward, sincere and touching. Among them, there are love poems that dare to love and hate, such as Mourning for the Past and Thinking, as well as sad funeral songs such as Li Hao and Autumn Dew. The funeral songs in Yuefu show the fear of death, while Song of Sacrifice to the Suburb shows the longing for and yearning for eternal life. Happy life and evil death show the other side of the Han people's spiritual world. They expect to transcend the limitations of individual life and enter the realm of bliss, which is also the wish of human beings.
As far as the artistic characteristics of Yuefu poetry are concerned, its "sense of sadness and joy, starting from things" is mainly manifested in the skillful narrative skills and the simplicity and purity of emotional expression. First look at the narrative achievements of Han Yuefu. The book of songs is mainly lyric poetry, and so is Chu Ci. Compared with the first two poems, the narrative poems in Han Yuefu have greatly increased, and these narrative poems are also the most essential parts of Yuefu poems. Han Yuefu's narrative technique is ingenious and has reached a high artistic level. This mainly shows that it is good at selecting one or several poetic fragments in life, carefully cutting and cleverly arranging, and concentrating contradictions on one focus by compressing narrative space. This not only avoids lengthy narration, but also leaves readers with rich imagination and shows a broader social background. Short narrative poems are often a scene of life, such as the scene where the protagonist draws his sword and highlights the sharpness of social contradictions. However, "Carrying Water in the Mountains" caught the accidental life segment of my late wife Lu Yu's late husband, so she knelt down and asked, so her husband answered, excusing her husband and saying that "the new man is not as good as the old man". As for why the old woman divorced, how the husband and the new couple got married, the life after the woman left, and so on. , have been omitted. The words of regret of the deceased husband are just a powerful proof that the deceased wife was treated unfairly. A slightly longer poem is to select several fragments of life, supplemented by refined expressions, to convey the main idea. For example, Gynecological Diseases has scenes of dying orphans, begging along the street, orphans crying and so on, with many details and even dialogues between characters. Through walking, collecting, transporting and many other labors, The Orphan's Journey highlights the plight of orphans.
Being good at narration, Han Yuefu created many vivid artistic images for us. Literature is a study of human beings, and its narrative is naturally inseparable from characters, and the ultimate goal of narrative is to express characters. Yuefu poetry is good at using expressive artistic techniques to portray characters and highlight their personalities. As described in detail in Ge Yanxing: "See you in winter and summer in front of the Swallow Hall." . Two or three brothers live in his county. So who should mend the clothes? Who should wear new clothes? Master Lai Dexian, can you get it for me? . My husband came from the door. He is inclined to the northwest. Speak clearly and don't be arrogant. Shimizu will see for himself. You'd better go home when you see the stone! "The woman sews clothes for the wanderer, and the man is not happy when he comes back, leaning against the door and squinting. The poem captures such a detail, showing the narrow-mindedness and indifference of the man, and needless to say, the countless hardships of tramp life. Such as vivid dialogue, the wife in Gynecological Diseases confessed to her husband before she died. Although she doesn't talk much, she vividly shows the bleak psychology of "mother" In Lin Yulang, a winemaker's phrase "Men love stepmother, women value ex-husband", coupled with the action of "splitting the red Luo", shows that a winemaker's arrogance and simplicity are not respected by powerful people. In contrast, Shang Mo Sang is the most successful poem in Yuefu. On the morning of the rising sun, Qin Luofu was dressed up. " Moss is a cage and cassia twig is a cage hook. There is a bun on the head and a bright moon in the ear. Yan Qi is the lower skirt, and Zi Qi is the upper skirt. "Her appearance is amazing. But this is only half of her face hidden behind her guitar, and he said nothing about his face. Then through the forgetfulness of walkers, teenagers, cultivators and hoes, the beauty of Qin Luofu is rendered, and the beauty of Luofu is set off from the side. This is the first time in the history of literature. Compared with Feng Wei's Telling People, Telling People is actually written, while Shang Mo Sang is imaginary, so there is more room for imagination. Then, the author set up a satrap to show Luo Fu's intelligence and nobility. In the Han Dynasty, the satrap (envoy) routinely followed the county in the spring, nominally "observing the folk customs" and "persuading people to be mulberry", but in fact it was often "annoying". Sure enough, when Taishou saw Luo Fu, he coveted his appearance. " Would you rather thank Luo Fu? "There is a poem in which Rove boasted about her husband. She not only boasted about her husband's clothes, accessories, appearance and expression, but also proudly boasted about his official experience:
Luo Fu Preface: You are so stupid. The monarch has his wife, and Luo Fu has his husband. Thousands of people ride the east, and the husband is at the top. What's the use of knowing your husband? A white horse is a descendant of a pony. Hair tied in ponytail, horsehead covered with gold. Deer sword, the deer in the waist, can be as high as10 million. A brief history of the fifteenth house, a doctor of the twentieth dynasty. Thirty people serve the middle class and forty people serve the city exclusively. As a white man, you need a beard. Ministry of Industry and Service of Ying Ying, Ran Ran and Zhong Chao. There are thousands of people sitting in the room, all of whom say that their husbands are extraordinary.
Write Luo Fu witty counterattack, the purpose is to satirize the satrap, let the satrap shame. At this point, Shang Mo Sang created a beautiful, industrious, witty, brave and loyal female image for us with "fax technique" (the source of Shen Deqian's ancient poems).
Look at the simplicity and purity of emotional expression in Yuefu poems again. Yuefu poems in Han dynasty have different styles, either profound or straightforward; Or sad or generous, but they are all unified in a simple overall style. The so-called simplicity means that the emotional expression of Yuefu poems is often unpretentious, plain and smooth, natural and natural, with a natural artistic effect. Its language is also "quality but not vulgar, shallow but not deep, near and far", which can especially reflect its simple and pure lyric characteristics. For example, the poem "Picking Lotus in the South of the Yangtze River", with five lines of "fish playing with lotus leaves", seems simple, but it is also very delicate. Repeated singing shows a warm atmosphere and the innocent and lovely girl picking lotus, which is as beautiful as a fairy and has the wonderful effect of "Nan Zhou grupe". As for The Orphan's Walk and The Woman's Galloping, they are all written in spoken language, but they are very artistic. Peacock Flying Southeast is also "true, natural and beautiful", which is closely related to folk rap literature.
Third, "Peacock Flying Southeast"
Peacock Flying Southeast is a famous narrative work in Han Yuefu, which can best represent the artistic achievements of Han Yuefu. Also known as "Ancient Poems for Giving Wife", it was first seen in Xu Ling's "Yutai New Poetry". According to the preface before the poem, the story described in the poem took place at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, and the poem was naturally written after the Han Dynasty.
Peacock Flying Southeast tells the love tragedy of Jiao Zhongqing, a small official in Lujiang Prefecture, and his wife Liu Lanzhi. Because Jiao Mu didn't like Liu Lanzhi, Jiao Zhongqing had to send his wife back to her family temporarily. In the face of forced marriage between brother and satrap, people who love each other can only die a double suicide. What caused the love tragedy between Liu Lanzhi and Jiao Zhongqing? What is the theme of peacock flying southeast? There has been a lot of controversy. In fact, the relationship between the characters in the poem Peacock Flying Southeast is very complicated, and there are many contradictions in it. There are many reasons for the tragedy, including ethics, the evil of paternalism and the conflicts between people after the awakening of human nature. Poetry is a tragedy as well as an ode to Liu Lanzhi and Jiao Zhongqing's loyalty to love, including their feat of defending love with death. In Yuefu poems of Han Dynasty, praising love and maintaining self-dignity are common themes, but they are not as heroic as peacocks flying southeast. In terms of ideological significance, Peacock Flying Southeast is incomparable to other Yuefu poems. The theme and expression of Peacock Flying Southeast have a great influence on later literature, especially novels and plays.
The artistic achievement of Peacock Flying Southeast is also very high. As a famous narrative poem of Han Yuefu, it has superb narrative skills. In order to reveal the evil of society and the sadness of love between Liu and Jiao, the poet set two clues, one is the contradiction with her mother-in-law and her brother, and the other is the love with her. The overlap of the two clues makes Peacock Flying Southeast ups and downs and exciting. Its narrative is not all-encompassing, but several expressive narrative units are carefully selected: mourning, telling one's mother, mourning, returning home, forced marriage, vows, and double suicide. Other relatively minor background contents are explained through the mouth of the characters so as not to dilute the theme. For example, Liu Lanzhi's talent, moral character and grievances are all explained by Liu Lanzhi's sad complaint against Jiao Zhongqing. When Jiao Mu reprimanded Jiao Zhongqing, she also explained her dissatisfaction with Liu Lanzhi and her marriage arrangement in Jiao Zhongqing. This not only saves space, but also makes the poem have enough space to describe the main plot units. For example, the section "Farewell" not only highlights the sadness and disappointment of Liu and Jiao's parting, but also calmly explains the parting with Jiao's mother and sister-in-law, showing her temperament and self-cultivation, and also exposes Jiao's lie that "this woman has no manners and makes her own decisions". Peacock Flying Southeast compresses the narrative space and shortens the narrative time as much as possible. The narrative rises abruptly, but stops abruptly, which makes readers always in a state of tension and always cares about the fate of the protagonist in the poem, thus receiving shocking artistic effects. Just as A Qing poet Shen Deqian commented on this poem in The Source of Ancient Poetry: "Poetry is precious. If we start with the family history of the two families and finally tell them how to be sad, it will not be redundant. So it is actually written in one or two sentences, and there are cuts in a long poem. "
The greatest artistic achievement of Peacock Flying Southeast is the successful creation of several distinctive characters, such as Liu Lanzhi, who is beautiful, wise and strong, Jiao Zhongqing, who is loyal and slightly timid, Jiao Mu, who is overbearing and violent, and Liu Xiong, who is attached to the phoenix, etc., each with its own characteristics. As Shen Deqian said in the source of ancient poems, "I am dripping with thoughts, I am repeating them repeatedly, and I speak the languages of more than a dozen people, but I am different." As a long narrative poem with a beginning and an end and a complete plot, Peacock Flying Southeast has enough space to depict characters. When the Peacock flies southeast, there are three points worthy of attention: first, the characters are placed in the whirlpool of contradictions and gradually unfolded by narrative techniques, so that their personality characteristics are distinct and prominent. Take Liu Lanzhi as an example. She is smart, beautiful, hardworking, pure and generous, stubborn, and will never give in to unfair fate. Under the unreasonable oppression of "five horses and three days off, adults are too late", she took the initiative to propose to Jiao Zhongqing: "If my concubine can't get away, she will stay idle and can abdicate in time." When she was sent home, Liu Lanzhi said goodbye to Jiao Mu and told her sister-in-law, including Jiao Zhongqing, to say goodbye. All people are calm, calm and strong, without pleading or crying. After she was sent back, my brother pretended to be a parent and forced her to remarry, but my mother refused to make the decision. She decided to die, so she looked submissive: "If you make a promise, you can get married." So, he got rid of the vigilance of his family and was able to discuss with Zhong Qing in secret, and finally achieved the goal of resisting to the death. It is this stubborn character and uncompromising spirit that makes Liu Lanzhi one of the glorious female images in classical literature. Secondly, in order to shape this character, Peacock Flying Southeast uses a variety of artistic techniques such as personalized dialogue, action, setting off the environment or scenery. For example, if you write a satrap wedding, the satrap style is really luxurious, so as to compare Lan Zhi's moral character of "wealth can't be lewd, power can't be bent"; Also use "today's severe cold, cold wind destroyed trees, first frost harsh" to render the tragic atmosphere. Thirdly, the two narrative clues in Peacock Flying Southeast are all around, which also puts her at the center of contradiction and makes her in sharp contrast with many characters, such as stubbornness compared with Jiao Mu's arrogance, strength compared with cowardice, loyalty compared with Liu's snobbery, and so on.
Peacock Flying Southeast has obvious characteristics of folk literature. There is a four-word "ancient Yan Ge" in Han Yuefu: "Peacock flies eastward, bitter and cold without clothes. It is sad to be your wife. If you can't weave a plane for three days at night, it's too late to transport horses. " Its content is related to Peacock Flying Southeast, almost the same as Liu Lanzhi's Mourning for the Past. Gu can be regarded as an ancestor or variant of Peacock Flying Southeast, and Peacock Flying Southeast is from this ancestor or a combination of several such ancestors, which makes Peacock Flying Southeast have obvious characteristics of folk creation and full of romance. For example, the mothers of Liu Lanzhi and Liu Lanzhi praised Liu Lanzhi's diligence and cleverness many times in her poems, which is a common artistic technique in folk songs. At the end of the poem, pine, cypress and phoenix trees, branches and leaves set each other off, mandarin ducks face each other, and the sound of harmony in the evening symbolizes the immortal love of Jiao Zhongqing and his wife and their pursuit of an ideal life, which is also a common way of dealing with folk literature. After the Wei and Jin Dynasties, the stories of double suicide between husband and wife are common, such as Han Ping and Lu Dongmei, Liang Zhu and become a butterfly, which are widely circulated, but in poetry, the peacock flying southeast is the earliest.
Lively language, concise and appropriate tailoring and complete and compact structure are also the artistic characteristics of this great narrative poem, which is rare in Han Yuefu.
Fourthly, the influence of Han Yuefu.
The folk songs of Han Yuefu are in the same strain as the Book of Songs in spirit, and even more directly and profoundly reflect the thoughts and feelings of society and people than the Book of Songs, and have a more concrete and direct impact on later poems. Many works have played an exemplary role in later literature.
Specifically, the influence of Han Yuefu is mainly manifested in the following aspects. First of all, after Feng and Ya, Yuefu poetry in Han Dynasty faced the reality and created the Yuefu tradition in the history of China classical poetry. Han Yuefu is rooted in the soil of reality, facing reality, exposing social contradictions and showing people's real and rich emotional world. His poetic spirit of "feeling sad and happy, starting from things" is the inheritance and development of the poetic spirit of "hungry people sing about their food, laborers sing about their things" in the Book of Songs. From the Han Dynasty to the Tang Dynasty, China's classical poetry has been permeated with the poetic spirit of Yuefu, that is, "from things" (Yuefu folk songs in the Han Dynasty) → "writing current events with ancient inscriptions" (Cao Cao Jian 'an's ancient poems) → "doing famous works without relying on things" (Yuefu with a new theme created by Du Fu) → "Singing and doing things together" (the new Yuefu movement advocated by Bai Juyi). From borrowing old poems from Han Yuefu to innovating, from unconscious or semi-conscious learning to becoming a creative principle, from drafting by a few people to forming a poetry school and a poetry movement, this shows that the realistic spirit of Han Yuefu folk songs has a great influence on later poets.
Secondly, the influence of Han Yuefu folk songs is also reflected in the creation of new poetic forms. The folk songs of Yuefu in Han Dynasty used a new poetic style: miscellaneous words and five words, which broke the tradition of four words since the Book of Songs. In the early stage, miscellaneous words dominated, and in the later stage, with the gradual intervention of literati, Wuyan Yuefu gradually became the mainstream. Miscellaneous poems are found in the Book of Songs and Songs of the South, but they are not in the mainstream as a whole. On the other hand, Han Yuefu poetry is completely free and flexible, from sentence to sentence. Miscellaneous language is an original ecological form of Han Yuefu poetry as folk literature, which is not intentional, but it does have a special aesthetic feeling and is a natural need for poets to express their feelings. The two are in harmony. Later poets such as Cao Cao's Xi Song, Cao Pi's Shang Mo Song and Chen Lin's Great Wall Cave Drinking Horses are all miscellaneous words.
After the Tang Dynasty, there were several types of works called Yuefu. The first is rhyming works, such as Song Ci, Yuan Qu and Ming and Qing Legends. Han Yuefu was originally a kind of music literature, so later generations called all rhyming works music Yuefu. This is Yuefu in a broad sense. Second, folk songs popular in rural areas, such as hanging branches and Ming folk songs. Although these works have not been collected and processed by national music institutions, they are "influenced by sadness and joy and are widely sung, which is somewhat similar to Han Yuefu's character. This is also Yuefu in a broad sense. Thirdly, the poems written by Li Bai and Li He in the Tang Dynasty, Lu You in the Southern Song Dynasty, Yang Weizhen in the late Yuan Dynasty and Liu Ji in the early Ming Dynasty with Yuefu as the old theme have made remarkable achievements in this respect. Li Mengyang and Li Panlong in Ming Dynasty also took the creation of Yuefu with old themes as their basic skills. It should be noted that Yuefu songs written on the old topic of Yuefu after the Tang Dynasty are generally classified as classical poems. The quatrains written with Yuefu's old poems are usually considered strict as long as they abide by the rules of adhering to modern poetry, so they belong to the category of modern poetry.