Wen Yiduo's stagnant water

Speaking of Xu Zhimo, we naturally think of Wen Yiduo, who is also a general of the Crescent School. After Tsinghua graduated, Wen Yiduo studied in the United States. He studied painting, but after leaving his motherland and hometown, he had a deep nostalgia for his hometown and motherland. As a way to express his feelings, he began to write new poems. After he came back, he became the theoretical spokesman of the Crescent School, and later broke with other figures of the Crescent School. However, at the important stage when the Crescent School was active, Wen Yiduo made great achievements in his creation and poetry exploration. His first book of poetry was called Red Candle, which was mainly written in the stage of studying in the United States from Tsinghua. After returning to China, he published another book of poetry called Dead Water, including a poem called Dead Water, which is Wen Yiduo's masterpiece.

This is a backwater of despair.

The breeze doesn't move at all.

Why don't you throw more rubbish?

Throw out your leftovers.

Maybe copper should be green to emerald.

How many peach blossoms are rusted on the tin can?

Let greasy weave a layer of Luo Qi.

Mold steamed some clouds for him.

Let stagnant water ferment into a ditch of green wine

Filled with pearl foam

Little beads laugh into big beads.

And was bitten by a flower mosquito who stole wine.

A desperate backwater ditch

You can also be smart.

If frogs can't stand loneliness,

Dead water again. It is singing.

This is a backwater of despair.

This is definitely not the beauty.

It is better to let ugliness cultivate it.

See what kind of world it has created.

This poem was written by Wen Yiduo after he returned to China. Seeing the tragic situation of the motherland's political darkness, social unrest and people's poverty is in sharp contrast with his beautiful imagination of the motherland in the United States, he felt strongly disappointed. It can be said that he wrote it with grief and indignation.

The meaning of stagnant water is not a pool of stagnant water, but actually a symbol of China in Wen Yiduo's mind at that time. In this stagnant water, the colorful beauty of red, green and white is used to describe the stagnant water. You can imagine the despair and rancidity of this pool. The only sound in it is the chirping of frogs, which shows the dead silence and hopelessness of stagnant water.

The poet expressed a meaning in the last sentence, that is, it is better to leave it to ugliness to practice and see what world he has created. There is a kind of grief and indignation in it.

It has been commented before that this shows the ideological limitations of Wen Yiduo, because he can't see the future and outlet of China. Collectors once had an explanation, which should be understood from the opposite side. What does Wen Yiduo mean? Let E practice, and the contest between evil and evil may open up a new world to express such a meaning.

But no matter how we understand it, in this poem, Wen Yiduo shows a kind of hatred and despair for the reality of China at that time, so he is accompanied by an inner anguish.

We all say that Wen Yiduo put forward the poetics of three beauties in theory: architectural beauty, musical beauty and painting beauty. What we are concerned about is the formal characteristics of this poem.

Formal characteristics of stagnant water

Third sister: Beautiful architecture? Musical beauty? Beauty of painting

The Beauty of Architecture: Neat Form

The formal founder standard is the pursuit of architectural beauty. There are nine words in each sentence and four sentences in each section. There is absolute symmetry in form between sections, and the key to realize this architectural beauty lies in a musical beauty.

Musical beauty: distinct rhythm

Wen Yiduo used a unique technique, that is, every sentence is the same number. Some have two words for a meal and some have three words for a meal. In his own words, it is a two-character ruler and a three-character ruler. The cross-matching between each other and the cross between the upper and lower sentences form a sense of cadence. For example:

This is? /A ditch? /Despair/stagnant water? Sidun

Breeze? /can't afford to blow/a little? /Hey? Sidun

Each meal has two words and three words, which are crossed and matched up and down to create a sense of cadence.

As we all know, no matter whether it is a word or a metrical poem, classical poetry has a metrical form, which ensures a rhythmic beauty of poetry. Due to the extensive use of disyllabic words and classical poems in modern Chinese, the meter of their poems is no longer applicable to modern Chinese.

Wen Yiduo was inspired by the rhythm of English. The combination of a vowel and a consonant in English is a pause, which is called a step. Wen Yiduo, translated as foot, is the smallest pause unit of language. A scale has two words and three words. As just introduced, cross-collocation also causes the rhythm of poetry summarized by classical poetry on the basis of monosyllabic words, which can achieve the same rhythm of a language. This is a creative musical beauty of Wen Yiduo.

Beauty of Painting: Beautiful Language

It mainly means that he used some very colorful adjectives in his poems. Wen Yiduo studied painting. He is particularly sensitive to color. He wrote a lot about expressing his feelings with some strong colors and a strong language, which can be said to be a typical representative in Still Water. The stagnant water was originally rancid, but he used beautiful words such as jade, pearl, white jade and green wine to describe it and pursue the beauty of his paintings. However, this kind of beauty shows the rancidity of stagnant water very appropriately, which is highly consistent with the theme to be expressed in the poem.

The neat form, distinct rhythm and beautiful language create a unique artistic conception, express Wen Yiduo's critical theme and realize a basic proposition of his own poetics of music beauty, painting beauty and architecture beauty.

Wen Yiduo's poetry creation practice has had a great influence at the critical moment of China's poetry development. China's new poems, from the liberation of Hu Shi's poetic style to the creation of Guo Moruo's free poems and free songs, can be said to be constantly progressing. However, he also left some problems. Some poets simply think that writing prose line by line is poetry. To a great extent, these poems have lost an essential thing of poetic beauty and become copies of prose. When poetry loses the essential provision of poetic beauty, the problem of poetry is facing a crisis of development. Which way should we go? The answer of the crescent school is to replace the old table with the new one. Moreover, the characteristic of this new meter is that there is no fixed format, but it is freely created according to the needs of poetic expression. In Wen Yiduo's own words, dancing in chains and dancing well is your skill, that is to say, pursuing the free expression of poetic beauty in restriction, freedom and restriction are two-way conflicts and contrasts to show the poet's talent and his creativity.

Wen Yiduo's exploration of poetry theory and creative practice is indeed a valuable spiritual wealth in the history of the development of new poetry in China. However, we must say realistically that the later development of new poetry did not advance along the road of crescent school. On the contrary, free verse has made higher achievements. For example, Dai Wangshu and Ai Qing in the 1940s used free verse to push poetry to a new stage of development.

Freedom or meter are the methods we can use in artistic exploration. The key to success lies in the proper use of your poet. It depends on whether you have the temperament of a poet and the potential to create poetic beauty. Compared with Xu Zhimo, Wen Yiduo's formal beauty has its own characteristics. We read Wen Yiduo's rigor from stagnant water, but we can vaguely feel Wen Yiduo's inner passion in rigor.

One of the characteristics of Wen Yiduo's poetry creation is that he opposes writing in the climax of poetry and advocates that poetry can only be written beautifully if it settles down. Form and emotion are opposite, and finally the most suitable emotional expression form is found. This form of beauty itself condenses the essence of poetic beauty. Wen Yiduo's experience in this field is also worth thinking about.

Wen Yiduo does not lack a romantic talent, but his characteristic is that when the romantic talent is about to break out and cause great social repercussions, he uses reason to adjust it, so the opposition between romantic feelings and forms is indeed a distinctive feature of Wen Yiduo's poems. In fact, through it, we can smell our own personality, the passion condensed by formal norms. Can we imagine that its further development will come to Wen Yiduo's last speech after his anger in the 1940s? Of course, this is the imagination that we can have the right to carry out. You may not agree with this imagination, but I think it is related. It is the logical result of a person's personality development. From this we can feel that a poem actually contains a lot of information, some of which may be very secret. As long as we understand the life of writers and poets with our heart, we can read what we want to read from it, and at the same time, this classic text can provide that kind of meaning and beauty, and we can enjoy it.