Meng Haoran's pastoral poems

Meng Haoran (pastoral poet in Tang Dynasty)

Meng Haoran (689-740) was born in Xiangyang, Xiangzhou (now Xiangyang, Hubei), known as Meng Xiangyang in the world. Because he has never been an official, he is also known as Monsanto, and he is a famous pastoral poet in the Tang Dynasty.

Meng Haoran was born in the prosperous Tang Dynasty, and he was determined to use the world in his early years. After experiencing the hardships and pains of his official career, he was able to respect himself, not flatter the vulgar world, and practice seclusion for life. Once lived in seclusion in Lumen Mountain. Traveling to Chang 'an at the age of 40 should be promoted by Jinshi. He once wrote a poem named Gong Qing in imperial academy, and he wrote for it. In the 25th year of Kaiyuan (737), Zhang Jiuling became a shogunate general and later lived in seclusion. Meng's poems are mostly five-character short stories, mostly pastoral poems and secluded poems, and most of them are in the mood of serving immortals. Although it is not without cynicism, it is more of a poet's self-expression.

The first person of the pastoral school in the prosperous Tang Dynasty, and the forerunner of the creation of "Xiang Xing".

Wang Meng's school of poetry

The poetic school represented by Wang Wei and Meng Haoran formed in the prosperous Tang Dynasty is also called pastoral school. In order to highlight its outstanding role in the pastoral poetry school, later generations also called it "Wang Meng Poetry School". This school is as long as the poems of Tao Yuanming and Schell (Xie Lingyun and Xie Tiao), with pastoral scenery and secluded life as the main theme, and its style dilutes nature. Meng Haoran's poems got rid of the narrow realm of chanting things in the early Tang Dynasty, expressed more personal hugs, brought fresh breath to Kaiyuan poetry circle, and won people's admiration at that time. Meng Haoran was the first poet who wrote landscape poems in the Tang Dynasty and the forerunner of Wang Wei. His travels are vividly described, and Dongting Lake's letter to Premier Zhang is magnificent. ? [5]?

Meng Haoran's life experience is relatively simple, and the theme of poetry creation is relatively simple. Meng's poems are mostly five-character short stories, mostly pastoral poems and secluded poems, and most of them are in the mood of serving immortals. Although it is not without cynicism, it is more of a poet's self-expression. Meng Shi's poetry is not carving, but thinking, full of wonderful self-satisfaction interest, not frugality and poverty. He is good at exploring the beauty of nature and life, immediately understanding the scene and writing his true feelings at the moment. For example, Qiu Deng Wan Shan sends Zhang Wu, Summer is in the South Pavilion, Guo Zhuang, Night Sleeping in Jiande, Night Song of Deer Gate, etc. , naturally become muddleheaded, but the artistic conception is clear and full of charm.

In Meng Haoran's view, the image in his landscape poems is no longer a description of the original landscape, nor a simple addition of his personal feelings, but a kind of expression technique, which combines the description of landscape images with the display of his thoughts, feelings and temperament, thus making the image description in his landscape poems reach an unprecedented height and raising the image in his landscape poems to an advanced artistic image form, that is, "image". It can be said that before Meng Haoran, no poet's landscape poems could touch the author's personality so deeply.

A relaxed and natural poetic style

Meng Haoran's poems are mainly characterized by seclusion, leisure, wandering and worrying, and his poetic style is light and natural, and he is good at five-character ancient poems.

Meng Haoran among the 36 Poets in Qing Dynasty

Meng Haoran was the first poet who devoted himself to writing landscape poems in Tang Dynasty. He mainly writes landscape poems, and he is one of the representatives of the pastoral school of landscape poems. In the early stage, he mainly wrote political poems and frontier fortress ranger poems, and in the later stage, he mainly wrote landscape poems. Today, there are more than 200 poems, most of which were written when he wandered, and some of which were written when he visited his hometown Wanshan, Xianshan and Lumen Mountain. There are also several poems describing rural life. The geographical scope of this poem is quite extensive.

Landscape is the most important theme of poetry in the Southern Dynasties, which has experienced long-term development and made remarkable achievements. By Meng Haoran, landscape poetry has been promoted to a new height, mainly in the following aspects: the relationship between emotion and scenery in poetry is not only a mutual foil, but also a close combination of water and milk; The artistic conception of poetry is more pure and clear because all unnecessary and uncoordinated elements are eliminated; The structure of the poem is also more perfect. Meng Haoran prefers water rafting during his trip, as he himself said: "For many mountains and rivers, he often goes boating." (Jingqilitan) His poems mostly describe the beauty of Jiangnan water town and the interest of roaming, such as boating in the west)

Fang Rixi pointed out in the article "On the Lightness of Meng Haoran's Poetic Style": "Throughout Meng Haoran's poems, there are roughly three kinds of light poetic styles: one is that the thoughts and feelings are light and there is no intense emotion; Secondly, the poetic expression is weak and there is no strong poetic display; Third, the language is pale and there is no colorful description.

Rich artistic conception of landscape poems

The artistic conception of Meng Haoran's landscape poems is full of vitality and tranquility. But he can also express his greatness with magnificent writing. Such as "seeing Lushan Mountain in Lipeng Lake". Pan Deyu, a poet in the Tang Dynasty, took this poem and fishing in Putan in his early years as examples, calling Meng Zhi's poem "vigorous and overlooking everything" ("Yang Shi Hua"), which showed its important characteristics of exuberance. Yin Kun, a famous poetry critic in the prosperous Tang Dynasty, likes to use the word "Xiang Xing" to talk about poetry. When commenting on Meng Haoran's two poems, he also said that "whatever the image, it is also true" (see He Ji Ling). The so-called "towards the star" means that the poet's emotion and spirit control the image, making it integrate with the vibration of the poet's mind, thus gaining life, personality and vitality. It is a common feature of Meng Haoran's poems to emphasize "looking to the stars". This can be seen more clearly by comparing several different works. The three poems, A Message from Dongting Lake, A Boat from Tonglu to Yangzhou Friends and A Night Sleeping in Jiande, are all about rivers and lakes, but they have different personalities. The first song was written by Meng when he applied for the Zhang Jiuling shogunate. He was excited to have a chance to try his ambition. He once wrote "Grateful to Play the Crown, Keep Peace and Stay Poor" (Shu Huai Yi Jing Yi Hao Tong) and "It's not too late for an old friend to die now" (Send Ding Dafeng Jinshi to Zhang Jiuling). It is this high-spirited emotion that made him write such a magnificent famous sentence as "Clouds, dreams and fog around Yueyang". The second and third songs were written on the day when I traveled to southern wuyue after I was down and out. The former wrote his own sad inner turmoil with the turbulent scenery of the wind and the river, while the latter wrote the feelings of lonely wanderers with the quiet scenery of the wild Qingjiang River. Their spirits are very different. Taking "Xing" as the essence and "Image" as the essence, highlighting the subject's emotional feelings, unifying the two and constructing a complete artistic conception are the important contributions of Meng Haoran's landscape poems.

Creative poetic expression

In and out of the ancient physique, full of free and easy feeling, which is also one of the manifestations of Meng's creation. The language of Meng Haoran's poetry is "light language but not light taste" (Shen Deqian's Poems), which does not communicate the strange and the different, but avoids the common. Some of his poems are often refined in simple descriptions, but the dense latitude and longitude seem to be inadvertently displayed, showing high artistic skill. For example, his famous work "Passing through the Old People's Village". Throughout the narrative, it seems to be homely, which is similar to Tao Yuanming's "Drinking" and other poems, but Tao wrote ancient style, but this poem is close to it. The couplet "We see green trees around your village, and the mountains in the distance are light blue" makes the finishing point to outline the typical environment of a village surrounded by green mountains and trees. There is also a five-line poem "Spring Dawn" that women and children can recite, which is also a subtle feeling of cherishing spring in natural language.

In addition, Meng Haoran often breaks through the limitation of the inherent formula in the use of poetic style, which makes him have a different interest. For example, in the poem "Looking at the boat in the middle", the flat and parallel tones are all in pentatonic format, but China's couplets are not parallel prose, which is full of ancient charm. Hu Yinglin's "Poems for Poetry" holds that such poems are "naturally short and ancient in the Six Dynasties, and if they rhyme, they will feel detached." Another example is "Returning to Lumen Mountain at Night", which is poetic, but only writes the journey of returning all the way at night, without extravagance. The scale of his writing system is similar to that of modern poetry, which absorbs the concise language of modern poetry and highlights the sentence structure of chorus, which is quite exciting to read. ?

Unique aesthetic view of poetry

Meng Haoran also has his own unique views on the artistic form of poetry creation. He advocates that poetry should think in images, shape images through the language of poetry and express the meaning of poetry through images. Readers are proud of "abandoning images and forgetting words". In the poem Ben Li Yue Xin Zuo Ting, he wrote: "We should abandon the image and realize, but forget the words and reason. What do you get in silence? Singing is also awkward! "Meng Haoran borrowed the theory of' abandoning images and forgetting words' in Buddhism and Taoism philosophy, and advocated that the lyrical expression and expression of poetry creation should not be too straightforward, but should have overtones and meanings beyond images.

Meng Haoran also advocated that poetry should be "exquisite and natural" instead of being bound by near-body rhythm. Meng Haoran collected 267 poems, including 63 five-character poems, 6 seven-character poems, 30 five-character poems, 4 seven-character poems, 37 five-character poems, 9 five-character quatrains, and 8 seven-character quatrains. It can be seen that except for 69 ancient poems, all of them are modern poems, with the most five-character poems. It can be said that he was the first poet who wrote a lot of modern poems in the prosperous Tang Dynasty. However, most of these poems can't be regarded as modern poems in the strict sense. Poems such as Looking at the Night in the Boat, From Sending to Yangzhou, Sending Yanjiu from Dongting Lake, Sending New moths from Duxia, and Going to Yanshan with Friends do not conform to the duality of five-character poems. However, the poet spoke highly of them. Yan Yu's Cang Lang Shi Hua said: "Everything is orderly and sonorous."

The complete maturity of modern poetry forms was in the Du period before Meng Haoran. Du is also from Xiangyang, and he can't help but know. So, why doesn't he go the way of Lao Du? In this regard, Shi Buhua's "Poems on Servants" thinks: "There are two typos and two typos in five-character Chinese, and all typos should be written in one breath, which is wonderful and natural. Novices should pay attention to confrontation and not fall into this situation. " In other words, Meng Haoran's five-character law is illegal because of its deep-seated aesthetic reasons. His pursuit of natural beauty is a correction to the excessive pursuit of formal beauty in the early Tang Dynasty. He combines ancient style with modern style, and his modern style is mostly ancient style. The metrical spirit of modern poetry is organically combined with the natural peace of ancient style, thus achieving the artistic realm of "beautiful artistic conception". Reading Meng Haoran's poems, we can't see the bondage of near-body meter, but there is a flowing nature. We should not only accept the rules of the near body, but also be burdened by the rules of the near body, and take nature as the first standard in everything.