Alley?
Long and curved?
I use the key.
Knocking on the thick wall
A generation of young people who have been thrown into darkness by history will naturally feel a sense of trance once they stand in the sun. This kind of confusion and loss is manifested in Bei Dao's poems as "Whistling along the pigeons/I'm looking for you" ("Lost"), and in Shu Ting's poems as "Across the eternal distance/They look at each other in despair" ("Ship"). Gu Cheng didn't sigh or look for the key, but picked up the key to find his room and his proper place in society. Alleys are "curved and long" and walls are "thick". To find it, you must pay a considerable price, otherwise you may have to walk a long way. But the lyric hero is firm, and "I" is stubbornly knocking, knocking and walking.
The poet only chose a few simple images: "alley", "key" and "wall", which formed a flowing picture with strong symbolic significance. The hero knocking on the wall in the picture is not a person, but a whole generation of young people, including middle-aged and elderly people. Aren't there many people in this world who have been looking for it all their lives?
Arc?
Birds are in the high wind
(of a road) curve sharply
Teenagers go to pick it up
A penny
Vines born of fantasy
And an extended contact line.
The waves flinched.
And humpback
? The poet arranges the images of four arcs in parallel, giving people a hint and a rational thinking. The "certainty" of poetry lies in the description of "arc" in the title, and in the superficial meaning expressed by four images: all movements in nature and human society take the form of arc, and "not only doing but not doing" and "unyielding" are the laws of the movement of all things; The "uncertain" side of poetry is hidden in the deep structure constructed by the combination of images. Birds turn around in the high wind, vines grow naturally, and waves change naturally. Isn't it beautiful? However, the artificial "arc" that "teenagers" bend over to "pick up" because of "a penny" cannot give people a sense of beauty. The obscurity of poetry brings many hints, such as the devaluation of human value in a deformed society, the pollution of innocent hearts by bad social atmosphere, the contrast between the harmonious beauty of natural arc and the disharmony of artificial arc, the metaphor that society has gone through detours and so on. Readers can have different opinions without seeking a fixed answer. Poetry is not to answer anything, but to enlighten.
In China's classical poems, there are some beautiful sentences, such as "the cock crows in Maodian", "the old vine fainted" and "a puff of smoke, the city is full of wind, Huang Meiyu". Western imagist poetry has Pound's famous sentence: "These faces in the crowd are many petals on a ghostly/wet black branch" (In a subway station). Gu Cheng's poems also omitted the imagery poems connecting elements, which was not original, but was once accused of being "unintelligible" because of the inertia of appreciation habits.