Chapter 37 How I wrote "Stars" and "Spring Water"

After the "May Fourth Movement", among the many forms of new poetry, there is one called "short poem" or "small poem".This kind of poem is very short, the shortest is only two lines, because I have written "Starry Stars" and "Spring Water", both of which are short poems, people think I wrote them first.Looking back now, I don’t remember how many contemporary short poems I read at that time. When I wrote "Stars" and "Spring Water", I was not writing poems, but I was influenced by Tagore and put myself a lot "Small thoughts", collected in a collection.

The story goes like this: During the May 4th Movement, I was still in a pre-university course. In the upsurge of the new culture, all kinds of new newspapers and periodicals sprung up. Not only did they contain many anti-imperialist and anti-feudal articles and works, but they also introduced foreign literature. Criticism, as well as novels, new poems, prose, etc. written in the vernacular.When our thirst for knowledge is at its strongest, we read these books and newspapers greedily outside of class, and even in class, we often put these books and newspapers under the textbooks, openly "peeking", and when we encounter some sentences that we particularly like, I just copied a few words crookedly on the eyebrows of the notebook.

I am used to doing this, and sometimes write down all my feelings and memories anytime, anywhere in a few words.There are many days, and there are quite a few things written down. Although they are roughly three or five lines, behind these three or five lines, there are always things related to you. Seeing these words reminds you of very kind and real scenes, and I can't bear to throw it away. At this time, I happened to see Tagore’s serial translation by Zheng Zhenduo in some magazine. (Tagore’s poems are mostly in the form of folk songs. The language is beautiful and simple, and the music is also strong. They are deeply loved by the Indian people. When he himself When translating his Bengali poems into English, in order to preserve the content of the poems, he did not adopt the rhythmic form of the lines of the poems, but translated them into prose poems. This is what I learned later. Is the original text a folk song? I don’t know the form.) This episode is very short and full of poetic and philosophical words.My heart moved, and I felt that the few words I wrote on the eyebrows of the notebook could also be sorted out and copied.When copying, I selected those that were more poetic and subtle, and put them together. Since they were fragmentary thoughts, I chose a paragraph of them, starting with the word Fan Xing, and put them in the first part, named It is called "The Collection of Stars".

Tagore's is a collection of poems, so is my "Collection of Stars" a collection of poems?I don’t have self-confidence on this point. At the same time, when I write these few words, I am not consciously writing poetry. Similarly, although the body is small, it has very sharp thorns, which are sharp for irony or reasoning, etc. And when I wrote "Starry Stars", I didn't think of Greek poems.) So I wrote in 1932 In the "Preface to the Complete Works" written in 1999, there was such a paragraph: "Water"... "Stars" and "Spring Water" are not poems, at least I was not interested in making poems at that time.I don't know much about new poetry yet, I'm skeptical, and I don't dare to try it.I think the focus of poetry lies in the content rather than the form. At the same time, if a long poem without rhyme is written without dividing lines, it will easily be confused with the prose of the poem.

I wrote "Stars", as said in the preface, because I read Tagore's work, and imitated its form, to collect my fragmented thoughts... This is something like a small miscellaneous feeling.... Now, I feel that the reason why I refused to call "Stars" and "Spring Water" poems at that time was because I really had the standards of poetry in my heart, and I think poetry should have rhythm—whether it is new or not. Old - the musicality should be relatively strong.At the same time, there should be cadences and setbacks in emotion. It would be too flimsy and hasty to turn a poem into a few words.Therefore, apart from writing more than 300 paragraphs of "fragmented thoughts" in one breath around the age of twenty, I never had anything like "Stars" and "Spring Water".

Later, in February 1921, I wrote a short prose "Lovely" in Xishan and sent it to the "Morning News Supplement". With the editor's note, it is: In the column, there is nothing wrong (separate writing and continuous writing are irrelevant, whether it is a poem or not, it depends on the content of the text), but fortunately, we divide the column, just to make a general classification, and do not limit what kind of category must be published in a certain column. The column of Miscellaneous Feelings has also published things of great poetic interest. This column and the poetry column are not just opened up today.

So, I started boldly to write some new poems, some with rhyme and some without rhyme, which are not in the title of this article, so I will not mention it for the time being. The writing history of "Stars" and "Spring Water" has been explained above, and now I re-read these two books myself, and I feel that many of them have rhymes, and the poetic flavor is not lacking. The main shortcoming - and my other The works are the same—as Comrade Zhou Yang said, "New poetry also has great shortcomings. The most fundamental shortcoming is that it has not yet been well integrated with the working people." In the era of the great struggle, he only paid attention to describing the trivial things around him, personal experience and feelings, neither expressing the emotions and thoughts of the working people, nor using the language forms that the working people like and are familiar with.Musicality is still important. When the working people are full of emotions, they always sing with rhyme. I have never read poems without rhyme written by workers, peasants and soldiers.As for the brevity of the form, it is not a shortcoming. Aren't the vast majority of folk songs today express great revolutionary spirit and lofty communist spirit in just four short lines?The poems of the working people are short but not flimsy, heroic but not sloppy, and the news must be dug from the poet's ideology!March 18, 1959 We Woke Up Spring". ) with a few additional words:

Over the years, I have often received letters from children with short poems in them, asking me to "rectify" them. I can't answer them one by one, and I don't have any secrets of poetry. I think this matter, Teachers can guide and help. If you see children doing some small poems after class, don’t let them lose their sense of elegance. Tell and introduce them to read more good poems from ancient and modern China and foreign countries, and the various rhythms of poems. It is necessary to teach our country's "four tones" (level, up, go, and into) and five tones (tooth, lips, tongue, nose and throat), and learn to write their sincere feelings in ups and downs of syllables, so that people will be willing to come down after reading it. , is a good poem, which I did not do in "Stars" and "Spring Water". I hope that the Chinese teachers of the children will teach them more in this respect, and don't let a child who can become a poet learn from you. Hands slipped by.

October 1980.