This is Homesickness by Yu Guangzhong, a poet in Taiwan Province Province (written in 1972). I recited this poem in Sichuan dialect several times, and the audience reacted strongly. The poem is well written and clear at a glance. Who wants me to write a poem for Zhan Zhan? I really want to say it, but I feel embarrassed. This is a crystal bead, with no flaws inside and no lines outside, and it is very transparent. You can see through it at a glance. Let me say something. What I saw, what others saw, shall I tell you? It seems that this crystal bead is naturally formed, not polished by craftsmen. ...

No, it's a poem, written by someone. Since it is written by people, it will never happen overnight. There must be a creative process. This process, if the author tells it himself, we will listen to it, or it will be helpful for writing poems in the future. Unfortunately, it is difficult for compatriots to get together across the sea. What a pity. Then, referring to the general experience of writing poems, I will take the liberty to guess how Yu Guangzhong wrote this poem.

Hometown, hometown, native land, and people's love are treated equally at all times and all over the world. Looking through the poems of Tang and Song Dynasties, it is surprising that wanderers write homesick works. Almost all well-educated modern China people have read or listened to Li Bai's "Looking up, I found it was moonlight, and then sinking, and I suddenly remembered home". I'm afraid all the students in the 1930s and 1940s have sung or heard this song sung by others: "Miss my hometown, miss my hometown, my hometown is really lovely. The sky is clear, the wind is cold, and homesickness bursts in. Hometown people, what they did today, never forget. In a foreign land, I am lonely and desolate ... "It's just that the tune of this song is borrowed from the New World Symphony by Czech musician dvorak, and not all singers know it. As for the exiled students who didn't want to be conquered people in the 1940s, almost no one couldn't help singing the exile trilogy. "My home is on the Songhua River in the northeast ..." When I sang on the stage, everyone in the audience cried, which was very touching. Yu Guangzhong will definitely sing this song. He can also sing "The Ballad of the Great Wall": "The Great Wall of Wan Li grew in Wan Li, and his hometown is beyond the Great Wall …" because he mentioned this song in a poem. What Qi Nian sang is unforgettable. Those distant memories can't have nothing to do with his homesickness. How many years of feelings have been hidden in a small poem!

Yu Guangzhong should clearly remember that he became an exiled student in his early years and fled to the rear area to study. There is a letter-taking column in the school. He goes there to study twice a day. My heart was tense and I scanned the long queue of envelopes to see if there was any familiar handwriting-my mother's handwriting with my name on it. After many disappointments, I received a letter, which was happier than toothache in the canteen. I can recite it after reading it again and again. Then check the stamp on the envelope. This is the postmark. There are big cities in the small circle, where my mother lives. I can see and touch it, but I can't go back to that small circle. Wan Li, the mighty Yangtze River, he is at this end (upstream) and his mother is at that end (downstream). This small stamp with the portrait of Dr. Sun Yat-sen and the postmark of his hometown left such a deep impression on him that more than ten years later, he wrote the "stamp":

A small green magic carpet,

Can fly thousands of miles a day;

Your passengers fall in love,

And generous friendship.

Two souls are your job,

You trudge in it all year round;

Until one day they met,

You can have a rest.

Stamps, postmarks and letters from home were so impressive that he wrote them in a poem "Notes on Plum Rain" until 198 1: "Square stamps/circular postmarks/only a tap/plain feelings (river note: thin letters from home)/left a mark." The first paragraph of Homesickness captures the image of a stamp, which is about the homesickness of a child and an exiled student. It is a stamp attached to a letter sent by my mother from afar. It is not only convenient for him to write like this, but also very reasonable.

He died in a hurry when he was a teenager, and the future poets grew up gradually. In the late 1940s, he moved to Hong Kong with his parents, and then went to Taiwan Province Province, where he entered the third year of the Department of Foreign Languages at National Taiwan University. 1952 After graduation, he published the first book of poetry, Elegy of Zhou Zi, which was well received by Liang Shiqiu, gained great fame and served in the army. The relationship between 65438 and 0954 and their future wives Mimi is evidenced by a love poem Mimi's Eyes. 1956 Retired, taught at Soochow University, married. Going to the United States for further study two years later should be considered as a wedding. Boarding at Keelung Port, Taiwan Province Province, crossing the Pacific Ocean and arriving at San Francisco Port, USA. Being in a foreign country, my heart is in my hometown, fiddling with the narrow ticket for the upcoming trip, I feel homesick. But at this time, the content of homesickness has changed, and the loving mother gave way to the bride. It is human nature to love your mother less and your wife more. The second paragraph of "Homesickness" captures the image of a boat ticket and says that the homesickness of a lonely stranger in a foreign country when he grows up is to lure him away from the bride's boat ticket. It is also appropriate for him to write like this. He writes about his true feelings.

1958 mother died and her body was cremated. He put the urn in the flowerpot on the windowsill and wrote poems to arouse his mother's soul, calling her kind soul to come back quickly, to this "small town after the fire" and to this "empty city in all directions". In this song "Piccolo evokes the Soul", he said to his mother's kind soul: "Spring has come, and I am stepping on the wet and cold Qingming Road,/burying you in a small grave in my hometown,/burying you in Jiangnan, a small town in the south of the Yangtze River (note: his mother is from Wujin, Jiangsu). /weeping willows hang down to your grave,/when spring comes, you should dream of a girl and your mother. " Yu Guangzhong is a dutiful son, and there are many chapters and sentences mourning his mother, which is very sentimental. The filial piety of sending mother's urn back to her hometown for burial has not been realized for more than 20 years, although spring has come. The urn must have been buried, probably in Yuantong Temple on the outskirts of Taipei, because he said in a poem that he heard his mother calling him at Yuantong Temple on the grave-sweeping day in Tomb-Sweeping Day. According to common sense, there should be a small grave there.

Stamps, boat tickets, graves, how much sadness is hidden in these images! They symbolize distance: the distance between stamps, tickets and space; Tomb, the distance between Yin and Yang, the distance between life and death. A thin layer of concrete separates the inside from the outside, so far, even farther than Qianshan! The third paragraph of Nostalgia captures the object of the grave, saying that the homesickness left by his mother after her death, the homesickness of a dutiful son, is the grave of the person who made him regret his death. At this time, the content of homesickness changed again, and the beloved wife gave way to her dead mother. This passage is a climax and an unexpected victory. The reader marvels, ponders and grieves. My voice trembled when I read this.

After middle age, people have experienced a lot, tasted all kinds of flavors, and gradually saw through all kinds of deformities in the world, so they are no longer curious; I gradually understood the difficulty of my career, so my ambition disappeared. His mind is looking forward to fewer days and more memories, more and more like a ruminant. He often chews old news in his stomach and has a sweet feeling. Therefore, "birds know it when they are tired of flying" and have the desire to return to their roots. I am busy during the day, but I don't think so. My hometown will often come to sleep at night. When I woke up in the morning, my dream was gone, and I was still in an ancient yard in Xiamen Street, Taipei. Homesickness is hard to send. Looking at the map of China, I wandered in Taihu Lake, upstream, and arrived at Yuelaichang, Jiangbei County, Chongqing, and downstream. Looking at Nanjing City, which is "the river and the Qinhuai River", I remember that there were many beautiful cousins there in the past ... What I hate most is that the Bay Strait is only two fingers wide, and the shallow seawater is thinner than paper, so I just can't get through it. At this time, the content of homesickness changed again and became a nasty strait. Perhaps the inspiration for homesickness comes from this?

Strait. I'm at this end. The mainland is over there ...

The first framework set in the draft is something like this. With this framework, I will go back to the warehouse of memory and look for objects symbolizing distance, such as straits. It didn't take much effort to find stamps, tickets, graves and the like. So these objects are used as beams, imitating the first frame, and the next three frames are set:

I'm here with stamps and my mother is there.

Boat ticket. I'm here and the bride is there.

Grave. I'm outside and my mother is inside.

This is the prototype of homesickness. The first framework, in terms of its importance, is the most important. I came out first, but it's over. Besides, in chronological order, you should also make an ending. Poets write about the past only to write about the present. Looking at a shallow strait now, I am worried, which is the foothold of the whole poem.

Yu Guangzhong classified homesickness as what he called "a simple job". When he said "simple works", he meant poems that were as "easy to read" as "Homesickness", not that "simple works" were necessarily bad. "Jane" means simple words, and "Yi" means easy to read. He doesn't object to simplicity, but "many readers" in Taiwan Province Island "require a poem to be understood after reading it", but they are disgusted with him. He said: "If a person can only read simple poems, he is doomed to be a hurried tourist in the poetic country all his life." I'm afraid that's too strong. Besides experts in writing poems, ordinary readers also have their own careers. They are very busy and tired, and occasionally they have leisure time. It's good to go to the poetry country without watching TV, movies, horse races or pornographic books, even if it's a hurry to cross the border. For such readers, it is reasonable to kowtow and thank them, but it is inappropriate to criticize them excessively. Besides, there are some profound poems in Taidao, which not only ordinary readers complain, but also experts who write poems say they can't understand. For example, in Zhang Mo's Silent Song, great poets such as lovers actually said, "I have read this poem for a long time and don't quite understand it." Not to mention ordinary readers. The requirements are simple and easy, and you can understand them after reading them two or three times, instead of getting more and more headaches. Shouldn't it?

The reason why I want to introduce homesickness to readers is precisely because of its simplicity. It is self-evident that its ingenious conception and ability to dissolve sadness into objects and images are worth learning from our painstaking poems.