The turbulent situation, sinister official career, political corruption in officialdom and strict gate system made Tao Yuanming extremely dissatisfied with reality. He resolutely resigned and retired, completely divorced from the officialdom for four years, that is, the second year after retirement, his hometown was burned and his life fell into extreme poverty, but he lived a poor and happy life. In the last few years in Yixi, the court recruited him as an official. In the third year of Yuanjia, Tandaoji, the secretariat of Jiangzhou, advised him to go out of the mountain. He kept a festival and refused to be an official.
Life can be reflected in his poems:
Guiyuantianju (No.1) Tao Yuanming
Few people do as the Romans do. Their nature is to love nature. I sneaked into the official career network and have been away from the game for more than ten years.
Birds in cages are often attached to the forests of the past, and fish in ponds yearn for the abyss of the past. I want to open up wasteland in Minamino and keep my humility to the fields.
The house is surrounded by about ten acres of land, thatched cottages. Willow trees cover the eaves, and peach trees cover Li Lieman in front of the hospital.
The neighboring village of the neighboring village is faintly visible, and there is smoke in the village. Dogs bark deep in the sky, chickens crow at the top of mulberry trees.
There is no dust and sundries in the yard, and the quiet room is comfortable and leisurely. Trapped in a cage without freedom for a long time, I finally returned to the forest today.
There are five * * * poems in Returning to the Garden, which are the works of Tao Yuanming at the beginning of his retirement. This poem "Parting from Custom" and another poem "Planting Beans in Nanshan" are both representative works of Tao Yuanming's pastoral poems, which have always been very famous.
This poem has twenty sentences. In the first eight sentences, the poet frankly expressed his disdain for the lifestyle of officials in the past, retired to the field and sought new life values from freedom. It also depicts the poet's incompatible with the secular, loving nature and advocating simplicity. He regards seeking fame and career as "falling into the dust net by mistake". The word "net" contains his extreme disgust and denial of the hypocritical officialdom life that binds people's spirit. "If you realize the past, you don't have to remonstrate. Those who know it can chase it." Thirty years have been wasted in the dust. Only when you return to the countryside can you breathe the fresh air of nature, and your heart is full of freedom and happiness. Some people think that "thirty years" here is "thirteen years", because from the time he became an official at the age of twenty-nine to the time he wrote this poem at the age of forty-two, it is exactly thirteen. However, it has been almost thirty years since he became "better and better" as a teenager. In fact, the numbers in the poem should not be understood on the spot. Here, both statements make sense, but they are just a kind of virtual reality. Judging from the performance characteristics of poetry, the imaginary is better than the real, so it is better to use "thirty". The poet expressed his attachment to Tian Yuan's former residence by "catching birds and thinking about the old forest" and "thinking about the old garden in the pool". The next "land reclamation" is naturally not about its hard work, but a relaxed and happy mood. Back in the countryside, he practiced his social proposition of "returning to simplicity". In his view, such a life close to nature is the most normal and basic way of life.
From the beginning of "the square house is more than ten acres", he described the peasant customs of the garden house delicately and vividly. Although this is a very common scene, it represents the typical characteristics of rural scenes: houses, huts, elms, willows, peaches and plums, distant villages, and smoke curling up ... especially the words "dogs barking in deep alleys and chickens crowing on mulberry trees" are very lively. Zhang Jie, a Song Dynasty poet, said: "In the Yuan and Ming Dynasties, dogs barked in deep lanes and mulberry trees crowed at the top of chickens. It was originally to express the leisure interest in the suburbs, not to praise the countryside." In other words, the author's original intention is not to write about the beauty of rural scenery, but to write about the interest of rural life, which is a good insight. In this poem, the scenery written by the poet is very common in the countryside. In isolation, they have no special aesthetic value. However, here, the poet endowed these ordinary scenery with "spirituality", and they were full of the pastoral life that the poet felt after returning to the field. In the poem, elm willow, peach and plum are so lovable, so are dogs and chickens, and the owner is even more lovable. The most common scenery also gives him a sense of intimacy and makes him feel free. Readers, on the other hand, are not bored with these common landscapes, but are infected by poems and find that these things that are usually unnoticed are so beautiful and interesting. It is a characteristic of Tao Yuanming's pastoral poems in his early seclusion to inject the subjective feelings of poetry into the scenery he wrote. This kind of expression method that pays attention to freehand brushwork rather than realism is also one of the characteristics of romanticism.
Why can poets have such feelings for the ordinary scenery in the countryside? The last two sentences of the poem answer this question: "Always in the cage, return to nature." It is precisely because of this cage life in the past that we can appreciate the value of this free life. Although the life here is simple, it is quiet, comfortable and natural compared with the life full of deception, hypocrisy and noise, which is more in line with Tao Yuanming's life ideal.
This poem uses many antitheses. This is an example of the extensive use of antithesis in poetry before the appearance of metrical poetry. What is commendable is that these antitheses not only use neat words, but also show the formal beauty of Chinese and have inherent rhythmic beauty. There are more than ten acres of square houses and eight or nine straw houses. "Warm people are in distant villages, and smoke is in the Yi market". It is effortless to write, and it has a simple and natural charm from the rhythm and artistic conception.
The lifestyle advocated by Tao Yuanming in this poem and many pastoral poems is undoubtedly an opposition to the dark politics at that time. However, from the perspective of social development, this idea of returning to nature and maintaining a primitive and simple life also has its backward side. This is also a limitation of Tao Yuanming.