Like the author, the book "Ou Lijuan's Reading of Ancient Poems" has the temperament of a good teacher.
There are two extremes that often appear in books on ancient poetry interpretation. One is to pile up a lot of gorgeous rhetoric and dress the article in a magnificent way. The skinny content cannot bear the weight of the rhetoric, but it looks very interesting at first glance. In fact, it means nothing, and I can’t understand what the article is going to say. The other type takes the eye-catching route, overestimating the readers' reading ability, and only interprets the poems to make them "easy to understand." From time to time, one or two Internet hot words pop up, writing Xie Lingyun as the second-generation travel blogger. Writing Tao Yuanming as an Internet celebrity makes people laugh and cry. Both forms of interpretation are painful. Teacher Ou Lijuan's writing is easy to understand but not frivolous, her writing is smooth but not showy, and she does not write poems in an overly interesting way in order to win readers' interest. Words are the texture, and the structure is the skeleton. Teacher Ou’s interest in interpreting ancient poetry is reflected in his ideas and perspectives.
It is undoubtedly a labor-saving and convenient way to interpret poetry according to the universal model of one person and one poem or to write about poets according to the inherent impression in the public mind, but Ou Lijuan did not do this.
What Ou Lijuan likes is the distant "call" in poetry. Myth is the creative source of a nation and the origin of a civilization. The book starts from ancient mythology and sorts out the classic poems of each era in chronological order. It is not only a reading of ancient poems, but also a history of the development of Chinese poetry. The book is divided into themes according to the theme of the poem or the author, surrounding the theme but not sticking to the theme. When interpreting a certain poem, citations are not limited to a certain line of poetry, a certain person, or even a certain culture. It has the historical and humanistic background of the same period, and also has "remote echoes" across time. So we saw the legend of Pangu and Magu shuttled in different poems, saw Tao Yuanming's "Peach Blossom Spring" and Wang Wei's "Peach Blossom Spring", and saw Sui Yang Emperor's "The jackdaws are flying around, and the flowing water is flowing around the lonely solitude". "Village" inspired "withered vines, old trees and dim crows, small bridges and flowing water, people" five hundred years later. I saw Chen Ziang who wrote "Thinking about the long journey of heaven and earth, crying alone with sadness" and "Only the infiniteness of heaven and earth" , how Qu Yuan, who lamented the long and diligent life, looked at the same universe. Teacher Ou Lijuan is not limited to the local cultural system, but also often refers to Western culture for horizontal comparison and integration. She focuses on poetry but is not limited to poetry.
When reading this book, it is more often that Teacher Ou guides readers to interpret poems rather than directly teaching her interpretation. What is important is the process rather than the interpretation itself. Readers do not have to agree with all of Teacher Ou's views, because she focuses on the process of observation. For example, the book breaks the rigid feudal stereotype of Confucianism and uses poetry as an eye to show the gentle and honest rational side of Confucianism; from the poems of Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty, the lonely and profound side of the tyrant is glimpsed, which enriches his thoughts and images; Cao Cao, who wrote poems in Hengshan, expressed his heroic tolerance and delicate insight in his poems; Pan An, who "worshiped Lu Chen" in order to seek fame, showed the complex side of ideal life in "Xianju Fu". Only by observing from multiple angles and understanding different viewpoints tolerantly can we gain insight into the different dimensions of beauty and charm contained in ancient poetry, see the human side of poetry and see the superhuman ideological spirit.
Poetry is a kind of inheritance and a kind of record. Poems have origins, are endless, have a sense of depth in time, and have a broad vision of different dimensions. How poetry is handed down from its source, inspiring generations after generations, and how people inject endless energy into it, all can be found in this book.