Combined with Pipa Xing, this paper summarizes how poetry expresses sound music with silent words.

Use a lot of vivid metaphors to describe music, from "big string" sentences to "four string" sentences. For example, when the overlapping word Cao Cao is used to write the music of big strings, it is compared to "torrential rain", when the overlapping word "earnestly" is used to write the sound of small strings, it is compared to "whispering", and when writing the ensemble of big and small strings, it is compared to "pouring pearls of all sizes into a plate of jade".

Comparing music with visual image and auditory image makes the performance of pipa girl very concrete. For another example, the poet writes two kinds of musical artistic conception: "slippery" first, and then "astringent" with the change of melody. The sound of "Pass" is as light and smooth as "Flower Bottom";

The sound of "choking" is as sad as "spring flow under the ice" For another example, the poet used the feeling of "going deep into sorrow, silence is better than sound" to describe the music realm with lingering sound and endless meaning, and used "the silver bottle is broken at the beginning" and "the iron horse stands out" to write the sudden playing of music.

Extended data:

Creation background

In the 10th year of Yuanhe (8 15), in June, the forces of the Tang Dynasty sent assassins to stab the Prime Minister Wu and the imperial minister Pei Du at the head of Chang 'an Street, which caused an uproar in the ruling and opposition parties. The forces of the buffer region further demanded the removal of Pei Du, so as to stabilize the buffer region's "anti-frontier" heart. Bai Juyi advocated the strict arrest of murderers, was suspected of "exceeding his authority", and often wrote allegorical poems, which offended the dignitaries in the DPRK, so he was demoted to Jiangzhou Sima.

Sima is the assistant of the secretariat. In the mid-Tang Dynasty, the placement of "criminal" officials was a disguised distribution. This incident had a great influence on Bai Juyi and was a turning point in his ideological transformation. Since then, his early fighting spirit has gradually worn away and his negative emotions have increased. In the autumn of the 11th year of Yuanhe (8 16), Bai Juyi saw off guests in Jiangtou, Xunyang, and met an Changan, who played the pipa, so he took this as the theme. This narrative poem is Pipa Xing.