A paper on taking part in agricultural labor
The more important agricultural poems in The Book of Songs are: Wind in July, Chutz in Xiaoya, New Nanshan, Futian, Datian, Minister, West, Harvest Year, Zaiheng and Zhou Song. The works that directly reflect Zhou people's agricultural production and life, such as July, are the best agricultural poems in the Book of Songs, and this poem is the longest among Feng's poems, with 8 chapters, 88 sentences and 380 words. This paper describes the hard work process of farmers for one year and their living conditions. They farm, raise silkworms, spin, dye silkworms, make wine, hunt, cut ice and build palaces. Most of the fruits of their labor were occupied by nobles. They have no clothes and no brown, work hard, burn wood, live in simple rooms, fill holes in the ground, smoke rats, plug windows, and paint cracks on doors to resist the cold wind in winter. The whole poem takes the season as the order, conforms to the seasonality of farming activities, combines customs, scenery and farmers' lives, and comprehensively, profoundly and vividly reflects the living conditions of farmers in the Western Zhou Dynasty. Poetry objectively reflects the disparity between farmers' life and aristocratic life, and expresses sadness and dissatisfaction in the straightforward description of agricultural production and farmers' life at that time. After a thousand years, readers can not only understand the agricultural production and farmers' living conditions at that time, but also truly feel their misfortune and pain.