Chapter 20 Guan Shanyue

I went to the Dunhuang Mural Exhibition the day before yesterday, and there are photos of Yumenguan and Yangguan, all of which are familiar from Tang poetry.Li Bai's poem "Originally fought in the land, and no one returned it", the group of people who fought on the battlefield were not wronged, because the years beyond the Great Wall were also the Han and Tang Dynasties.In the infinite space and time of the Han and Tang Dynasties, even though they died, they shared the same landscape with the living farmers and weavers.If the survivors are engaged in weaving brocade and patterns, what they want is the affection of the brocade and the air that exists in the flower branches of the patterns.Of course they are not wronged.This cannot be a utilitarian explanation. For example, if there is no defense of the frontier with their death in battle, the culture of the Han and Tang Dynasties cannot be guaranteed. Then they sacrificed only to protect the living means of the survivors, which is narrow.

So far I have fully understood the beauty of Li Bai's song "Guan Shanyue".The full poem is: The bright moon rises between the vast sea of ​​clouds in the Tianshan Mountains The wind blows tens of thousands of miles across the Yumen Pass Han goes down Baideng Road, Hu peeps at Qinghai Bay The reason is that there is no one to return to the battlefield The garrison looked at the side and thought about it, what a bitter face High-rise buildings should not be idle when they sigh this night The beginning is a nature, the wind and the moon blowing tens of thousands of miles across the Yumen Pass.And this nature and the human world are written together, with the sadness of recruiting people and missing women, but it does not mean anti-war thinking.

Because I think of Zhu Xining's "Beautiful fire knotted on the poinciana tree", it can be matched with this.The clear sky of the flaming poinciana is the same as the artistic conception of the first four sentences of Li Bai's poem.The woman in the Phoenix tree knows that her husband is dead, and the missing woman in Li Bai's poem is still thinking about recruiting people. There are two different ways of writing, and I feel that it is even better.In the middle, "Han went down to Baideng Road, Hu peeped at Qinghai Bay", but there is no shortage, it is simple and uncolored, and these places are the most capable of Chinese poetry.

Fusheng, Tokyo, March 23, 1966