There is an idiom that goes, "Cicadas don't know snow." Cicadas are often born in June and July and die in autumn. They cannot wait until winter. Therefore, cicadas often chirp at the end of summer, and the ancients also used cicadas as a signal for the arrival of autumn.
Cicadas usually chirp under the dense shade of trees, and the places where you can hear cicadas are mostly in secluded places. Therefore, literati often write about the cicada's chirping to set off the tranquility of the environment, and listening to the cicada's chirping also reflects the literati's interest in life.
The most typical example is Xin Qiji's "The bright moon leaves the branches startled by magpies, and the breeze sings cicadas in the middle of the night." The moonrise startles the birds perching on the branches, and the cicadas' chirping makes the night seem even more silent. This song " "Moon over the Xijiang River" is a poem describing pastoral scenery, showing the beauty of quiet life and the poet's enjoyment of life in a mountain village. In the five-character poem "Enter Ruoye Stream" written by Wang Ji of the Southern Dynasty, he used the two sentences "The noisy forest is more quiet than the quiet one, and the mountain is even more secluded with the singing of birds" to set off the quietness with movement, and use the noise of cicadas and birdsong to describe the tranquility of the mountains and forests.
For another example, the poet Yao He of the Tang Dynasty described his quiet life in the poem "Xianju", "I don't know how humble I am, I live in the city all the year round. There are no horses in the door, and the house is full of cicadas." "Sound", the sound of cicadas is used here to complement the tranquility of one's residence and express one's leisurely mind.
Literati during the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties associated cicadas with autumn. When Pan An was the county magistrate in Heyang, he wrote, "The cicadas are singing in the cold, and the chrysanthemums are shining in the autumn flowers." Xu Ling wrote in "Poems in Response to the Order of Mountains and Ponds": "The ape crows to know that the valley is late. The cicada is aware of the autumn in the mountains." ; Xue Daoheng's "Summer Evening Poems" also contains the sentence "The sky is clear and the distant colors are clear, and the autumn air is filled with the sound of cicadas".
The earliest poem about cicadas appears in the Book of Songs. "The Book of Songs·July" writes: "In April, the weeds show, and in May, the weeds sing." This sentence means that the grass grows luxuriantly in April, and the cicadas can be heard chirping in May. "The Book of Songs: Dang" also writes: "Like a cricket, like a locust, like a boiling soup." This sentence means that the cicada's chirping is like boiling water, disturbing people's thoughts. The xiao and xiao here refer to cicadas.
In the pre-Qin period, most of the poems about cicadas described their cries. By the time of the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, literati included cicadas in poetry not only to describe their sounds, but also to describe sounds, shapes, lifestyles, etc. in many aspects. For example, Fan Yun's "Poetry of Early Cicadas" written by Fan Yun during the Southern and Northern Dynasties "is born with thin ice in spring, and is lighter in texture than autumn dust. The fluid is flowing from the sky, and the flying sound is clear from the dew." This poem details various aspects of cicadas. describe.