The other kind is to express emotion by borrowing things, such as Hu Shi's Pigeon's Crow, Zhou Zuoren's River, and Shen's Moonlit Night. Some directly express an abstract idea, such as Lu Xun's dream, man and time, an idea of Hu Shi, Xuan Lu's idol, Liu Dabai's Out of Time and so on. It is in these new poems that a large number of vague images and allegorical images appear, and they show strong subjective will, which is rare in China's traditional poems. Early vernacular poems mainly showed prosaic tendency and plain style.
Prose cultural tendency: basically do not rhyme, regardless of height, change long and short sentence patterns with emotional ups and downs, flow slowly like water, and naturally form a soothing and free internal rhythm; At the same time, a large number of function words are used, and the sentence patterns and rules of vernacular prose are used to connect the images of poetry with clear semantic logic, which is essentially different from traditional poetry.
Simple style: Some early vernacular poets are keen to learn from folk songs. Peking University Ballad Research Association was founded in 1920, initiated by Zhou Zuoren, Liu Bannong, Shen and other early vernacular poets, and began the efforts of modern new songs and ballads. While collecting folk songs in Jiangyin, Liu Bannong also wrote more than 20 four-sentence folk songs in Jiangyin dialect, which was compiled into Wafu Collection. Later, he wrote Yang, which also included the creation of modern folk songs.
Liu Dabai's poems such as "Selling Cloth Ballads" and "Tianzhu Lai" also directly borrowed the style of folk songs. This is also a natural response to the tendency of humanization and nobility in traditional poetry, which is consistent with the trend of popularization of May 4th literature. Zhu Ziqing once pointed out that since the founding of New China, Zhou's literature advocated humanitarianism as one of the characteristics of new poetry. Humanism is the unity of individualism and fraternity, which is fully reflected in new poetry. Hu Shi's The Old Crow, Zhou Zuoren's The River, Chen Hengzhe's Birds and other poems, although expressed in different ways, all show an individualistic spirit of pursuing freedom. Poems with the theme of charity abound, such as Hu Shi's rickshaw puller, Shen's rickshaw puller, Killing sheep and pigeons, Liu Bannong's Carpet, Paper Separated by a Layer, Apprentice's Pain, and Yu Pingbo's Unknown Mourning Poem. Either show sympathy for the sufferings of the lower-level workers or show pity for the weak animals. Early vernacular poets made immortal contributions to the birth of new poetry, but their poems also had serious defects.
First of all, it is too dull, emotional concentration is not enough, imagination is not enough, aftertaste and fragrance are not enough.
In early vernacular poems, description, metaphor and symbol all have the characteristics of being reasonable and plain. On the other hand, it lacks artistic imagination. Most of the early vernacular poems have the nature of' historical documents', and their historical value and limitations lie in this. This is related to the fact that early poets were not very clear about the inherent characteristics of poetry, such as their preference for expression and imagination. It also reflects that they do not pay enough attention to the difference between poetry and novels.
Secondly, the language of poetry tends to be prose. They only pay attention to the difference between the new poetic language and the old poetic language, that is, the difference between vernacular Chinese and classical Chinese, but not the difference between poetic language and other literary genres. Although they also wrote many rhyming poems out of habit, and even emphasized disyllabic rhyming, the basic guiding ideology is to pursue so-called natural syllables. Excessive pursuit of the naturalness of syllables will inevitably make the language of poetry lose its due rhythmic beauty or sense of rhythm. But these are all deficiencies in progress, which will be gradually overcome with the development of new poetry.