Chapter 14 Remembering Mr. Wen Yiduo

Mr. Wen Yiduo is a poet I admire. I have read almost every one of his poems, from "Red Candle" to "Still Water". He has studied both Chinese and Western poetry, and has deep research and attainments in both ancient Chinese poetry and Western poetry.He can master the rhythms of Chinese and Western poetry, and he can use them smoothly and easily.Therefore, his poems are always so easy to read, so powerful, so natural, and so sonorous.He himself once said: "The strength of poetry includes not only the beauty of music (syllables), the beauty of painting (words), but also the beauty of architecture (the symmetry of sections and the uniformity of sentences)." Most of his poems have achieved These points are just that "Dead Water" written later is more concise and rigorous than "Red Candle".

I'm not a poet, and I can't speak the jargon of criticizing poems. As a lover of poetry, I'm connected with Mr. Wen Yiduo's life. It's better to say that he himself is a poem—a poem rather than a poem like a man. Love freedom, love justice, love the ideal poem, a great patriotic poem! I have only met and talked with Mr. Yiduo seven or eight times.I remember the first time was in the spring of 1925, when our foreign students in Boston performed the classical drama "The Story of the Pipa". Mr. Yiduo came to Boston from New York for the spring break. Because he was studying fine arts, everyone asked him to perform Actors make up.On the second day after the play, Mr. Yiduo came to see me with several classmates.

There were so many people talking that day, and I forgot what I said.The second meeting I remember very clearly was in the summer of 1930, when he and Mr. Liang Shiqiu came to visit us at our new residence at Yenching University (at that time Wu Wenzao and I had just been married for one year).As soon as they came in, they waved their fans and shouted hotly. I hurriedly poured two glasses of cold water for them. Before they sat down, they first looked at each room and stood in the middle of the living room for a while. .” I thought they had gone to see other friends nearby, but they didn’t care.But after a while, they came back, and Mr. Yiduo took out a pack of cigarettes, threw it on the coffee table, and said with a smile: "Everything in your new house is good, but there is no tea and cigarettes to entertain guests, so remember it in the future! "It made me laugh and embarrassed!

At that time we were not used to drinking tea, and there was no cigarettes for guests at home.Mr. Yiduo established a "custom" of treating guests with tea and tobacco for our newly formed small family. Although I haven't met Mr. Yiduo many times, he is a very familiar acquaintance in my mind.Wu Wenzao and he are classmates at Tsinghua University, and I know almost all of Mr. Yiduo's classmates and friends.From his and my friends, I keep hearing his name, and his name is often mentioned with his poems, more often he is himself!He is upright, enthusiastic, bold and unrestrained, and he loves his motherland, his relatives and friends, and all the people and things worthy of his love.He is a white-hot flame, he is a bundle of sensitive nerves!He himself said: "A poet should be a gramophone film. The steel needle will ring when it touches him. He can't decide when to ring and when not to ring. He is completely passive. He cannot control himself and cannot save himself. It is." So his poems are his language, the cheers and cries from his heart, but his cries are artistically and rhythmically "flying on the wild wings of fantasy, and then Sing loudly and boldly" came out.

When he was studying in the United States, he missed his hometown, his friends and relatives. When he returned to China early, he found that there was no peace within his "square walls". A tragedy under the mill of life".He couldn't stop his heartbeat.During the Anti-Japanese War, he excitedly followed Tsinghua University, where he taught, to Kunming. However, the Kuomintang government's "results in the Anti-Japanese War gradually showed their flaws", and his excitement gradually declined because of the cold facts.But later on, the colder facts made him stand on the side of progressive young people, and made him realize that "the real power lies in the people, and we should match our knowledge with their power."He did not write poetry during this period, but he said: "Poetry is responsible propaganda." He attached great importance to the social value of poetry.He threw his own poetic power into the raging waves of the people's power. On July 15, 1946, he finally turned against the crime and raged at the KMT's pistol!

As a poet, Mr. Yiduo did not write more poems than others, but his death is the greatest poem!As early as April 1926, in his article "Literary Art and Patriotism——Commemorating March 18th," he said: "I hope that the blood that loves freedom, loves justice, and loves ideals will flow in Tiananmen Square. It flows in Iron Lion Alley, but it also flows on the tip of the pen and on paper." "Perhaps sometimes a little verbal performance is not enough, so you have to show your own experience. So Lu You, a seventy-year-old man, wants to "spray tears on the dragon's bed, please go north", and Byron is going to die on the battlefield. So Byron The most perfect and greatest poem is this death..."

It has been almost thirty-three years since Mr. Yiduo passed away. Today I am writing this article in memory of Mr. Wen Yiduo, whom I admire. Looking back on the past thirty-three years, I really think about the future and think about the past, with endless emotions!Chairman Mao said: "We Chinese have backbone." Mr. Wen Yiduo, who was once a democratic individualist but first of all a patriot, once he found the truth that the country can be saved only by uniting with the broad masses of the people, he held his head high. Awe-inspiring and unyielding, he walked towards the "dark power", and he left us his most perfect and greatest poem!

We are not poets, but we are still Chinese, we still need to have backbone!On the road to socialism and communism in the motherland, we will also encounter the "dark power" of various imperialists and reactionaries.Let us always remember these words of Chairman Mao, and always take Mr. Wen Yiduo as an example, no matter what kind of dark power we are under, we will try our best to be a Chinese with backbone!April 19, 1979