Like a bird flying in spring.
I don't know where it came from,
Like a star at dusk
From the deep sky;
Like rain from Yun Ni;
Like a stream flowing down from the land,
Like a low or high voice
Suddenly broke the silence;
Like grapes on a vine,
Like fruit covered with branches,
Like a breeze blowing into pines and cypresses,
Like an angry tide on the ocean;
Like that white sail
Shining on the beach,
Like a smile floating on your lips,
Silver foam emerges from the blue waves;
Poetry comes from this,
From the land of fog,
From a strange country,
Hit the poet's heart.
It's his, not his-
The songs he sang;
It's his, not his-
The song and his honor.
Because the voice of poetry
Urged him day and night,
When the angel says, "Write!"
He must listen and write.
(Translated by Yang Deyu)
Through rich association, this poem makes people see various forms of poetry, and makes people understand how poetry came into being and the relationship between poets and nature and life.
At the beginning of the poem, eleven appropriate metaphors are used to form parallelism, which has a feeling of flowing water. Poets compare poetry to birds, stars, rain, streams, sounds, grapes, breezes, surging tides, white sails, smiles and so on. Through these images, readers seem to see all kinds of poems, some beautiful, some bold, some graceful, some sad, some happy, some rich, some diluted.
Most of these metaphors compare poetry to beautiful things in nature, and also imply that poetry is natural and inseparable from nature, so it has natural charm. The two sentences in the first section of this poem, one negative and the other positive, have a good effect. "I don't know where it came from" and "From the Deep Sky" set each other off.
If the first four sections of this poem tell readers what poetry is, then the last three sections tell readers how poetry came into being and why poets write poetry. In the fifth section, the poet thinks that poetry often comes from the misty territory. Longfellow is a poet with a sense of mission of the times and a sense of national mission. He believes that his mission is to "create American cultural heritage in the form of meaningful poetry, and cultivate a generation of poetry readers in the process." He always associates poetry with his motherland. Although the sixth and seventh sections are not as appealing as the first four sections in art, they contain profound rationality. Poetry belongs to poets, not poets. Poetry is not a poet's, because poetry is contained in life and nature, not a poet's natural existence; Poetry belongs to poets, because poets discover beauty with their own eyes and extract the beauty of poetry with their own subjective feelings. So, further, the poet's honor is his, not his. He wrote not only for his own needs, but when the angel asked him to write, he began to write. This angel is life, times and beauty. When the angel inspired him, he couldn't help singing. Longfellow said that poetry should entertain, inspire and guide people. Therefore, when life needs joy and an era needs to wake up, the poet first stands up and inspires his people with his upright personality spirit.
Longfellow is a typical theorist of "Art for Life", which is completely opposite to Wilde's "Art for Art's sake". Because of this, and because a considerable part of his works expressed the lives and thoughts of laborers, his poems were widely read in the United States and Europe at that time. However, with the development of productive forces and the change of social ideology, his poems are not very prosperous in this century. However. His contribution to American poetry is indelible, and his wisdom and exquisite art will still shine in its unique way. His poems have become a tradition today, but this tradition has gained firmness, extensiveness and sociality after a long time of perfection and precipitation, which is also the reason why traditional art has such lasting vitality.
Yihai