Qingming Festival Ancient Poems

"Qingming" by the Tang Dynasty poet "Du Mu".

1. Original poem:

It rains heavily during the Qingming Festival, and pedestrians on the road want to die.

May I ask where the restaurant is? The shepherd boy points to Xinghua Village in the distance.

2 Translation:

The drizzle falls one after another during the Qingming Festival in the south of the Yangtze River, and all the travelers on the road are in despair.

Ask the locals where to buy a drink to drown your sorrows? The shepherd boy smiled without answering and pointed to the village deep in the apricot blossoms.

Extended information

Creative background

This poem was first seen in the "Splendid Ten Thousand Flowers Valley" in the early Southern Song Dynasty and was noted as a Tang poem. "Selected Poems of a Thousand Families of Xianjia in the Tang and Song Dynasties", "Poetry of a Thousand Families" by Xie Fangde of the Ming Dynasty, and "Selected Poems of the Tang Dynasty" by Emperor Kangxi of the Qing Dynasty.

"Jiangnan Tongzhi" records: When Du Mu was the governor of Chizhou, he went to Xinghua Village to drink. Xinghua Village refers to this in the poem. There are Duhu Lake, Southeast Lake and other scenic spots nearby.

This little poem contains not a single difficult word, nor a single allusion. The entire poem is written in very popular language, and is written with great ease, without any trace of artificiality. The syllables are very harmonious and perfect, the scene is very fresh and vivid, and the realm is beautiful and interesting. It is also natural for poems to be told in chapters, written sequentially.