Chapter 13 Section 3 Poems of the Middle and Late Tang Dynasty
In the middle and late Tang Dynasty, the heyday of the dynasty has passed, but the poetry creation has not declined. There have been Han Yu, Liu Zongyuan, Zhang Ji, Li He, Bai Juyi, Yuan Zhen, Liu Yuxi, Du Mu, Li Shangyin, Wen Tingyun, Du Xunhe, etc. with different styles. outstanding poet.Their poems reflect the crisis and folk suffering in the process of the decline of the Tang Empire from different angles. Their artistic achievements are very high and they have a great influence on later generations.
Han Yu is a master of prose and a famous poet.He admired Li and Du the most, but he did not imitate them step by step, but created a unique style through his own exploration.The characteristic of Han poetry is to seek novelty and avoid vulgarity, and together with his good friend Meng Jiao, they are called "Han-Meng Poetry School".His "Mountain Stone" is one of his representative poems:
20 poems are equal to a complete travel note.At the beginning, the reader's imagination is led from the rugged mountain road to the temple at dusk, and he sees the bats coming and going in the confused night sky in a trance.The author sits comfortably on the steps to rest and sees the gardenias blooming after the rain. This should arouse people's interesting reverie.Then I wrote about looking at the murals, eating, and staying overnight until I went down the mountain the next day.At this time, what I saw was a different scene: the ups and downs of the difficult-to-find mountain road, the mountains on both sides are full of flowers, the stream is green, and the beautiful trees are caged, and then I wash my feet in the clear stream, and the cool wind blows on the body. What a relief!The last four sentences are arguments: this is happiness in life, why bother to be that official and let others control it?Those friends of our group, can you never resign and return to your old age?This poem is all about the things in front of me, the choice and narration are just right, the sentences are sharp and clear, and the artistic conception is fresh.
Li He is also a famous poet.His poems are influenced by Han Yu, but the style is different from Han Yu.His poems are rich in imagination, peculiar in image and magnificent in diction. He often writes about ghosts and ghosts in eerie ways, and he is called "ghost talent".It is said that in order to write good poems, he often took a young slave on a trip on a donkey. When he came up with a good sentence, he quickly wrote it down and put it in a broken kit, and then dyed it into a poem when he returned home.One of his "South Garden" poems expresses his deep anger as a poet:
Yang Xiong of the Han Dynasty once compared reciting poems and composing Fu to "carving insects and seal cutting", which is insignificant."Diao Chong" here refers to the person who wrote the poem.Li He said that he is a person who devotes himself to "finding chapters and extracting sentences" to write poems. He often writes poems all night long, only the bow-like Xiaoyue outside the curtain to accompany him.The country attaches great importance to martial arts, and fights in Liaohai (referring to the north) every year; those who write poetry and composition have to cry in the waning autumn wind.He did not live forever, and died at the age of 27.
The most accomplished poet in the mid-Tang Dynasty was Bai Juyi.Bai Juyi (772-846 A.D.), styled Letian, was an official for half his life. He was as famous as his friend Yuan Zhen, and was called "Yuan Bai".He advocated that "articles should be written for the times, and songs and poems should be written for events" ("Yu Yuan Jiu Shu"), that is, poetry and prose should serve the times and the reality.This explicit theory is quite progressive.He is familiar with and sympathizes with the sufferings of the common people. His 50 political allegory poems "New Yuefu" and 10 poems "Qin Zhongyin" are good works pleading for the people.Let's read a poem "Light and Fat" in "Qin Zhongyin":
One of the root causes of political corruption in the Tang Dynasty was the monopoly of eunuchs.This poem satirizes eunuchs.Wearing red and purple, they rode high-headed horses to show off in the army for a banquet. After drinking fine wine and fine wine, and eating delicacies from mountains and seas, they were triumphant and energetic, as if no one was around.At the end of the poem, there is a sudden change of style: This year, there was a severe drought in the south of the Yangtze River, and the tragedy of cannibalism occurred in Quzhou (now Quxian County, Zhejiang Province)!Without a word of discussion, the thought has been clearly expressed: it turns out that what these gangsters eat is the blood of the people! In addition to "Qin Zhongyin" and "New Yuefu", there are many similar poems, such as "Selling a Salary Girl to the Prostitutes" written by Bai Juyi when he was the governor of Hangzhou:
The women who sell firewood wear rough cloth turbans on their messy hair, and go to the cold mountains to carry firewood every day; they are also women who grew up by the Qiantang River, why do other people wear red and green, ride horses and sit in sedan chairs, and live their lives? Comfortable days? The prostitutes "riding in red" are prostitutes. In fact, they live another kind of bitter life. They dress well on the surface, but they pay the price of being played by others; the real exploiters are those dignitaries who oppress farmers and play with prostitutes.There are injustices hidden in the injustices, and the poem is quite thought-provoking.Bai Juyi's poems are very famous and have great influence in foreign countries (such as Japan).His masterpieces also include long narrative poems and "Pipa Xing". The former is about the love story of Tang Xuanzong Li Longji and Yang Yuhuan, and the latter is about the bitter experience of a prostitute. decline.Late Tang poets Du Xunhe, Nie Yizhong, Pi Rixiu, etc., learned from Bai Juyi and wrote many good poems reflecting the suffering of the people.
Li Shangyin and Du Mu are outstanding poets in the late Tang Dynasty.Du Mu's fresh and bright lyric poems are widely known.Li Shangyin is good at rhyming poems, and often satirizes reality by singing historical themes.We read his poem "Sui Palace":
"Ziquan" is the name of Chang'an water (formerly known as Ziyuan, changed to Ziquan to avoid the taboo of Tang Gaozu Li Yuan), referring to Chang'an.The first couplet said that Yang Guang, Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty, fortunately never returned to Chang'an when he traveled abroad. The palace there was only shrouded in mist and was very lonely; because Yang Guang wanted to take the prosperous Yangzhou (Wucheng) as his capital and enjoy himself there.In the couplet, the author assumes that if the jade seal handed down by Qin Shihuang did not belong to Li Yuan (it is said that Li Yuan's face is "sun horned dragon court" and his forehead is shaped like the sun, which belongs to the appearance of an emperor), that is, the Sui Dynasty will not perish, then Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty The dragon boat with brocade as its sail might swim to the ends of the earth, and his extravagant and absurd behavior will not stop.The neck couplet says that when Emperor Sui Yang came out to play at night, he asked the people to collect a large number of fireflies and let them fly for him to enjoy. Today, the fireflies in the chaotic grass have disappeared (the ancients have an unscientific saying that "rotten grass turns fireflies"); only Emperor Sui Yang excavated On the willow trees on both sides of the Grand Canal, there are countless crows flying at dusk, as if mourning the demise of the Sui Dynasty.Chen Houzhu (Chen Shubao) was a licentious emperor who misled the country. After being captured by Yang Jian, Emperor Wen of the Sui Dynasty, he had contacts with Yang Guang, who was then the prince.After Yang Guang became emperor, he met the dead Empress Chen in a dream, and asked Chen Empress's favorite concubine Zhang Lihua to dance "Flowers in the Backyard of Yushu".The two sentences in the last couplet discuss this: after the death of Emperor Sui Yang, he met Empress Chen at the foot of Jiuquan, so there should be no more singing and dancing of "Flowers in the Backyard of Yushu", because he himself followed the old path of Empress Chen. feel ashamed.This poem was written in response to the corruption of the emperors in the late Tang Dynasty.However, writing poetry is just writing poetry, and no emperor will wake up because of this.Let's see which dynasty lost people like Chen Shubao and Yang Guang after the fall of the Sui Dynasty?Just as Du Mu said in "A Fang Gong Fu", "The people of Qin have no time to mourn for themselves, but later generations mourned, and later generations mourned without warning, which also made future generations mourn for future generations."
Poems in the Tang Dynasty are unprecedented in terms of the number of authors, the wide range of themes, the superb art and the far-reaching influence.We must inherit and study this precious heritage, absorb its essence, and hope to create a new peak of Chinese poetry one day.
