Dead Water is one of Wen Yiduo's important representative works. After returning to China in 1925, the poet was furious with him when he witnessed the tragic situation of domestic warlords fighting and people living in poverty.
Through the multi-angle and multi-level composition of the symbolic image of "stagnant water", this poem exposes and satirizes the corrupt old society and expresses the poet's despair, indignation and deep patriotic feelings towards the ugly reality.
The poem A Desperate Dead Water is a symbol of semi-feudal and semi-colonial old China. Grasping the "death" of stagnant water, the poet first wrote the dead silence, then the color, and then the foam, which highlighted the stench and corruption of stagnant water and showed the feelings of "despair" incisively and vividly.
Wen Yiduo is an advocate and pioneer of new poetry meter, and Dead Water is his "most satisfactory test" of new poetry meter.
He stressed the need for "three beauties": music beauty, painting beauty and architecture beauty. The whole poem consists of 5 sections and 20 lines, each with 9 words, and the second and fourth lines of each section rhyme, with strong sense of rhythm and full of musical beauty.
Many colorful words and images are used in the poem. Colorful words contrast the ugliness of the content and make the face of "stagnant water" even more disgusting. The whole poem consists of 5 sections, 4 lines in each section and 9 words in each line, which has both a sense of neatness in appearance and an inner sense of rhythm. "Dead Water" has made a serious and fruitful exploration for establishing the rhythm and form of new poetry.
Writing characteristics
"Dead Water" pays attention to rhetoric, and strives to use rich and delicate words without repetition. For example, the verbs used in the following phrases are by no means the same: "Green becomes emerald", "Rust produces several petals of peach blossom", "Weave a layer of Luo Qi", "Steam out a few clouds", "Ferment into a ditch of green wine" and so on.
Writing here, it concludes that the stagnant water is "somewhat vivid". But the "unusual" here is only a faint color. Then he showed the "sound" of stagnant water.
This voice is also very unique, with "laughter"-"Little beads laugh into big beads"; There is also "singing"-"If frogs can't stand loneliness, they will still stop singing." What a terrible silence.