all one's life
Meng Jiao's ancestral home is Pingchang (now northeast of Linyi, Shandong). He lives in Luoyang (now Henan). When his father Ting Jun was a lieutenant in Kunshan County, he was born in the suburbs. Meng Jiao lived in poverty in his early years and traveled to Hubei, Hunan and Guangxi. When Zhang Jianfeng was guarding Zhenyuan Xuzhou, the suburbs went to pay homage. At the age of 46 (45), he began to enter the Jinshi, and there is a poem "After the Senior High School Entrance Examination": "There was no limit to boasting in the past, but now there is no limit to debauchery; Spring breeze is proud of horseshoe disease, and you can see Chang 'an flowers all in one day. ".Then return to the east and go to Bianzhou (now Kaifeng, Henan) and Yuezhou (now Shaoxing, Zhejiang). In the seventeenth year of Zhenyuan (80 1 year), he served as the governor of Liyang in the south of the Yangtze River. His masterpiece Ode to a Wanderer was written in Liyang. I often took pleasure in writing poems when I was in office. If I can't write poetry, I won't go out. Therefore, I am called a "poetry prisoner". I don't care about Cao, and I was fined half a salary. At the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty, Henan people Yin and Zheng Yuqing tried their best to help them compete for land and water transportation in Henan and settled in Luoyang. At the age of 60, his mother died. Zheng Yuqing guarded the apricot garden and acted as a staff officer, trying to evaluate things. Jiao was invited to Ganxiang (now Lingbao, Henan), and Yuanhe died of sudden illness in nine years. Meng Jiao's friend Han Yu and others raised 100 yuan for his camp burial, and Zheng Yuqing sent someone to give 300 yuan "permanent support for the widow".
evaluate
In the Tang Dynasty, people thought that Meng's poems were a kind of "Yuanhe style", "Yuanhe has fallen" and "learning is too exciting for Meng Jiao" (supplemented by Li Zhao's Tang Shi). At the end of the Tang Dynasty, Zhang Wei wrote a picture of the poet's subject and object, and regarded it as a "lonely and bitter owner". Song Dynasty poets Mei and Xie Ao, Qing Dynasty poets Hu Tianyou, Jiang Kun and Xu Chengyao were all influenced by him. After Han Yu and Li Guan, there are also some related works, such as Xiu, Huang Tingjian, Fei Zhou, Pan Deyu, Liu Xizai, Chen Yan, Qian Zhenqian and Xia Jingguan. There are Su Shi, Wei Tai, Yan Yu, Yuan Haowen and Wang Kaiyun who hold derogatory views. Both he and Jia Dao are famous for their bitter songs. Su Shi called it "thinness on an isolated island" (Yu Wen in Sacrifice to Liu Zi), and later commentators took Meng Jiao and Jia Dao as the representatives of bitter poets. Yuan Haowen even ridiculed him as a "poet prisoner" ("Thirty Poems"). The current Biography of Meng Dongye's Poems is 10, which was compiled and published by the Northern Song Dynasty. Huang Pilie Shu in the Northern Song Dynasty is no longer visible. Lv Xinyuan's shadow copy of the chicken bone pavilion in Song Dynasty belongs to Japan today. There are two popular books: Ji Gu Library Book and Xiaomin Zhu Mo Book. Four series of Ming Hong in Ye Tibetan were photocopied in Hangzhou. 1959, People's Literature Publishing House published Hua Chen's Revision of Meng Dongye's Poems, with Meng Jiao's chronicle and memorial collection. Annotations include Chen Yanjie's Meng Dongye's Poems and Xia Jingguan's Selected Poems and Comments on Meng Jiao. For deeds, please refer to Mr. Han Yu's Epitaph, Biographies of the Old and New Books of the Tang Dynasty, Chronicle of Mr. Meng Dongye in Xia Jingguan and Chronicle of Tang Meng Jiao in Huachen.
style
People once called Meng Jiao and Han Yu "Han Meng Poetry School", mainly because they were curious about ancient times and wrote more ancient poems. But Meng Jiao's works are mostly short sentences and five-word old sayings, and the language is carved but not gorgeous. He is good at combining strangeness with Gu Zhuo, such as Han Yu's so-called "hard words, appropriate words" ("Recommended Scholars"). And Han Yu's seven-character ancient style is the most distinctive, magnificent and magnificent. Their poems are full of strength, but Han Yu's strength is unrestrained, while Meng Jiao's strength is restrained. He learned more about the tradition of five-character ancient poems in the Han, Wei and Six Dynasties. As Li Ao said, "Suburb is a five-character poem, and since the Southern Dynasties, Li (Ling), Su (Wu) and Jian 'an scholars have been able to be both men and women" (Book of Zhang Servant Shooting Xuzhou). Therefore, compared with Dali and Zhenyuan poets, he is closer to the character of Han and Wei dynasties; Compared with Han Yu and Li He after him, he retained more traces of Dali and Zhenyuan's poetic style.
This does not mean that Meng Jiao just blindly imitated the poetic style of the Han, Wei and Six Dynasties. While studying the art of ancient poetry, he also has his own distinctive characteristics.
From the content point of view, Meng Jiao's poems are beyond the narrow range of themes in Dali and Zhenyuan periods. Of course, the main theme of his poems is the resentment of the middle and lower literati against poverty and hardship, which is determined by his repeated trials and tribulations, hard career and the loss of children in middle age. But he can still see some broader social life through his personal destiny and reflect these lives with poetry. Some of them expose and criticize the ugly phenomena in social interpersonal relationships, while others sharply reveal the inequality between the rich and the poor. For example, The Poem of the Weaver Girl describes the abnormal phenomenon of the Weaver Girl's "how to weave a quilt and wear a blue silk dress" by comparing it with "the frost blows through the wall and the pain can't escape". He often has profound psychological experience in writing such poems. For example, the phrase "A cold man would rather be a moth and burn him to death" in Folk Songs of Cold People is beyond the reach of ordinary people who describe people's sufferings. It should be said that after Du Fu, Meng Jiao once again profoundly exposed the contradiction between the rich and the poor and the disparity between bitterness and happiness in society with his poems. There are also some poems by Meng Jiao, which describe the ordinary love of human relations, such as the love between husband and wife in love, the love between father and son in Apricot Wounds, and the love between mother and son in Wandering Son. These themes have long been ignored by poets.
Among them, Ode to a Wanderer is a sincere, profound and touching poem:
The mother used the needle and thread in her hand to make clothes for her long-distance son. Before leaving, I had a stitch for fear that my son would come back late and his clothes would be damaged. Who can say that a filial child like the weak can repay his mother's love like the sunshine in spring?
In terms of artistic techniques, Meng Jiao's poems have a new feature, which Dali and Zhenyuan's poems do not have, and which has never existed before. That is the danger and difficulty mentioned in Han Yu's Epitaph of Mr. Yao Zhen. On the one hand, it is related to his deliberate job search and hard thinking, on the other hand, it is related to his depressed mood and depression. In Interpretation of Night Feeling, he said that he "reads at night and talks about ghosts and gods. How not to be idle, the heart is the enemy. " To write poetry hard, we must deliberately seek new words and expressions, and use strange words and cold images that are rare in past poems; However, his psychological depression and injustice make his pursuit of a new language show the color and meaning of coldness, desolation and withering, so as to show the inner as much as possible. The sadness and sorrow carved into the bone are shocking, such as:
The old worm sounds like iron, and the beast is surprised by the solitary jade robe (the twelfth of "Fifteen Poems of Autumn");
Sick bones can be chewed, and sour groans can also be written. You are so thin, you follow the west (the same as the fifth);
Coody Leng's dream was shattered, and the cold wind combed his bones. Ill words are printed on the table, and the intestines turn to worry (ibid. 2);
After twists and turns, it did turn around. Black grass and iron hair, white hair and ice money (the fourth of Ten Stones);
Wash your eyes hard, and the angry water will disturb the rest of the turbulence (ibid., tenth).
In these poems, he carefully selected penetrating verbs such as "Hui", "Comb", "Seal" and "Brush", as well as verbs such as "cold wind", "old bug", "iron hair", "surging water", "black grass" and "ice". Meng Jiao's poetic style has always been widely evaluated. For example, Han Yu and Li Ao praised him, but later generations, such as Yuan Haowen, called him a "poetry prisoner" (Thirty Poems), and Su Shi compared his poems to "empty claws" with hard shells and tasteless chewing (reading Meng Jiao's poems). But to be fair, the linguistic originality of Meng Jiao's poems is undeniable. Xu Yi, a poet in the Song Dynasty, said that he "can tie facts together, which is the most difficult thing to do", that is, he expressed his appreciation for his ability to transform the form of objective things into self-expression with powerful language, which is really not easy.
Of course, Meng Jiao also had simple, natural and fluent poems, but these poems were not very eye-catching at that time (although poems such as Ode to a Wandering Son were widely read in later generations), but the poems of the above styles showed new changes and new features in poetry creation in the Yuan and Mongolian periods in content and language. Curious and dangerous poetic style has been further developed in Han Yu's hands and has become a trend.
There are more than 500 poems by Meng, of which short stories and five ancient poems are the most, and there are no metrical poems. In art, I am not conformist, or I am good at drawing lines without allusions and words. My language is simple and clear, but I try to avoid mediocrity and simplicity. Or "hook the chapter and stab the sentence, pinch the stomach and kidney" ("Epitaph"), thinking about its difficulties and carving its risks; As Han Yu said, "backward scale and clever words" (Answer to Meng Jiao) swept away the weak poetic style since Dali. Some of these poems reflect the reality of the times and expose the evils of the buffer region, such as Complaining for Women, Feeling for Feelings, Killing People Out of the Border, Wounding Spring, etc. Some people care about people's lives and resent the inequality between the rich and the poor, such as "Weaving Maid Poems" and "Singing to People in Cold Regions". Some show the deep affection of flesh and blood, such as wandering, making love, apricot mourning and so on. Some of them describe landscapes, such as The Banquet between Ruzhou Nantan and Lv Zhongcheng, Youkou and Wang Waiya's Twenty-one Liuxi, Shilaishi, Hanxi, Seeing Your Majesty off to the Tiantai, Aixia and Visiting Zhong Nanshan. Although the contents of social life are different, they all have profound thoughts and novel language, which embodies the characteristics of Meng's poems. Some works, such as Autumn, are depressed. Poems such as "Going out is an obstacle, who is the width of the world" ("To Cui Chunliang") reflect the hardships of the world and show a narrow state of mind.