Chapter 43 Chapter 7 Mr. Zhu Guangqian's English Poetry Lesson

When I entered the second year of the Department of Foreign Languages, I had Teacher Zhu's "English Poetry" class for the whole year. Although I was nervous to face the challenge, it also had a reassuring effect, and I started to study immediately.Teacher Zhu used the standard anthology of the world at that time, "The Treasury of English Poetry" edited by the American poet Palgrave, but the library moved to Wuhan University had only six textbooks, and allocated three to girls and three to boys, and they were assigned in turn. The progress of the course is to copy poems before class.I went to Jiale Paper Factory and bought three of the best Jiale paper notebooks. They are dreamy light blue from the inside to the outside. They are full of poems and teacher's instructions under the dim light. I am happy to study for a year His handwriting is still on the paper that breaks at the touch of a touch, with me to this day.

Although Mr. Zhu uses "The Treasury of English Poetry" as his textbook, it does not follow the editor's chronological order - it is divided into Shakespeare, Milton, Gray and Romantic periods.The poems he selected in the last semester were all about educating literary taste, teaching us what a good poem is, and the first group was Wordsworth’s string of crystal-clear "Lucy Poems". Who is the elegant and quiet girl Lucy, no one has been sure for two hundred years, but the five little poems he wrote in memory of his eighteen-year-old lover who died young are treasures in the history of English literature. Few can surpass it.The last song "At that time, darkness covered my heart" is one of the best medicines for me to heal my wounds and relieve pain in the past sixty years.I recite it in speeches and articles, hoping to prove the power of poetry to life. Teacher Zhu must have hoped to use this to start our education in Western literature.In the third poem of this series, "I Travel Among Strangers", the poet said that I would never leave England again.

Because the last thing Lucy saw was the green fields of England—this was the most beautiful and powerful patriotic poem for me, who was patriotic above all else. Teacher Zhu selected more than ten short poems by Wordsworth, pointing out the simplicity of the text and the appropriateness of the scene. Speaking of his "The Lonely Reaper", she said that when her singing faded away, it reminded people of Qian Qi's poems in Tang Dynasty, " At the end of the song, no one is seen, and there are several peaks and green on the river". Until one day, I learned a poem "Margaret's Misery" by Principal Wordsworth, about a woman whose only son went out to earn a living, and there was no news for seven years.Across the swamp, the poet hears her calling her son's name every night, where are thou, my beloved son, "(Where are you, my dear son?) Whenever I meet someone, I ask if I have met them, and I speculate about various disappearance situations.

Teacher Zhu read "the fowls of heaven have wings,...chains tie us down by land and sea" (the birds in the sky have wings, and the earth and the sea are what bind us tightly), and said that ancient Chinese poems have similar winds and clouds and birds At this time, the sentence "there are no roads, Jianghan is limited and no beams" was swallowed at this time, and after a slight pause, he continued to read, saying "if any chance to heave a sign" (if anyone sighs for me,) "they pity me, and not my grief." (It is me they pity, not my sorrow.) The teacher took off his glasses, tears streaming down his cheeks, suddenly closed the book, and walked out of the classroom quickly, leaving the room in astonishment, but no one spoke.Perhaps, in such a difficult time, when frank displays of affection are a luxury, it is an uncommon accident, and even a privilege, for college juniors who still worship idols, to be able to see To the tears of affection from a famous literary teacher.

When I taught the history of English literature more than two decades later, The Treasury of English Poetry had been completely replaced by New Age anthologies, and this poem was rarely selected.Different times shed different tears.However, most of the poems selected by Mr. Zhu are still in the important anthologies today. The second part of the English Poetry class is mainly intellectual. Several sonnets of Shakespeare talk about the meaning of eternity and eternity. Shelley's "Ozymandis) also appears in this group; the mighty The broken head of the Egyptian king is half buried in the wind and sand, boundless and bare, the lone and level sand, stretch far away.

Teacher Zhu quoted that this is the meaning of a thousand years in the world, just a night in the sky. There are many such famous sentences in Chinese literature, but listen to this, the sound of bOUndless and "bare" is heavy, and the sound of lone and leVel is light. It can be seen that another language, a different sense of beauty. As for "Ode to the West Wind", the teacher said that since China has its own vernacular literature, everyone quotes its famous line, "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" ("If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?") To the point of tiresome frivolity.What Shelley's odes want to celebrate is a wild spirit, the inspiration of youthful life, and the deterrent force that destroys the dead.The whole poem is composed of five sonnets, and the seventy lines must be read in one go. The cycle of the four seasons of the sky and the inner throbbing of the human heart are intertwined to see the majestic and moving power of romantic poetry.In the small room in the side hall of the Confucian Temple, Mr. Zhu lectured with a serious expression and seldom made gestures, but at this moment, he vigorously swiped and swept with his hands... He read verses in his mouth, teaching us how to use them, themind `s eye' imagines the imagery of the howling west wind. This is the first time I have really seen the imagery in Western poetry, and I will never stop using it in my life.