Meng Jiao

Meng Jiao

Meng Jiao (751-814), a famous poet of Tang Dynasty, was born in Wukang, Huzhou.

His ancestors lived in Luoyang (now Luoyang, Henan Province) and lived in seclusion in Songshan mountain when he was young. Meng Jiao was No. 1 in the two examinations. He was only a Jinshi when he was 46 years old, and once served as a county lieutenant in Liyang. Because he couldn't relax his ambition, he left behind and wrote poems. As a result, the county magistrate was replaced by a fake lieutenant. Later, he was recommended by Henan Yin Zheng Yuqing and worked in Henan. In his later years, he lived in Luoyang.

In the ninth year of Yuanhe, Emperor Xianzong of Tang Dynasty, Zheng Yuqing recruited him to join the army in Xingyuan mansion again. He went with his wife to Wenxiang county (now Lingbao in Henan Province). He died of severe illness and was buried in the east of Luoyang. Zhang Ji's posthumous title was "Mr. Zhenyao".

Meng Jiao's work poems. Because his poems are mostly about the coldness of the world and the sufferings of the people, he is known as "the prisoner of poetry" and "the poor country island" together with Jia Dao. There are more than 500 poems of Meng, most of which are short stories and five ancient poems. This biography of the "Meng Dongye poetry collection" 10 volumes.

Life experience

Early life

In 751, Meng Jiao was born in Wukang, Huzhou. His father, Meng Tingfen, was a petty official. He was a county captain of Kunshan county. His family was poor. Meng Jiao was isolated from his childhood and had little contact with people. In his youth, he lived in seclusion in Songshan, Henan Province, but the beginning and end time and the specific situation of this experience can not be studied.

From 780, the first year of emperor Dezong's Jianzhong reign, to 790, the sixth year of Zhenyuan reign, Meng Jiao was between 30 and 40 years old. He witnessed the changes of feudal towns at that time in Henan. He wrote poems for Lu Yu's new Shanshe in Shangrao, Xinzhou, and later sang with the poet Wei Yingwu in Suzhou. From the Central Plains to the south of the Yangtze River, his whereabouts are uncertain, but he has no other career to record except writing poems.

Middle age and

In 791, when Meng Jiao was 41 years old, he offered tribute to Jinshi in his hometown Huzhou, so he went to Beijing for Jinshi examination.

Zhenyuan eight years (792), the second. It may be during this examination that he met Li Guan and Han Yu. In the old book of Tang Dynasty, it is said that Meng Jiao was "lonely and widowed, and Han Yu thought he was forgetful"; their personalities were different from the common customs, which was the cornerstone of their engagement. Although Meng Jiao is seventeen years older than Han Yu, and his writing ability is strong enough to be an enemy of Han Yu, his fate is bumpy and his official career is tough. On the contrary, because he was praised and praised by Han Yu, he became a famous poet of Han Yu's poetic school. In the ninth year of Zhenyuan period, Meng Jiao took the Jinshi examination and went down again.

In the 12th year of Zhenyuan (796), Meng Jiao, 46, was ordered by his mother to take the exam for the third time before he was promoted to the first place. Then he returned to the east to comfort his mother. In the 13th year of Zhenyuan, he lived in bianzhou. In the 15th year of Zhenyuan, he met his friend Li Ao in Suzhou, and then traveled to the mountains and waters of Yuezhong.

In the 16th year of Zhenyuan (800), Meng Jiao was Liyang Wei. At the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty, he was engaged in land and water transportation in Henan Province and settled in Luoyang.

In 801, at the age of 51, Meng Jiao was appointed by his mother to Luoyang to be elected as the county captain of Liyang (now in Jiangsu Province). In the 18th year of Zhenyuan, Han Yu wrote a preface to send Meng Dongye to the south of the Yangtze River It's against his wishes to be a county captain, so it's impossible to do his duty as a county captain. Not far from Liyang City, there is a place called toujinlai, and there is gupingling city. The forest is thin and there is water under it. Meng Jiao often goes to visit, sits by the water, wanders and writes poems, so that Cao Wu is abandoned. So the county magistrate reported to his superior and asked someone to do the job of county captain for him. At the same time, he gave half of his salary to that person. Therefore, Mengjiao was extremely poor.

In 804, Meng Jiao resigned from the post of Liyang captain.

Life in old age

In the first year of Yuanhe (806) of emperor Xianzong of Tang Dynasty, Zheng Yuqing, Yin of Henan Province, was appointed as Yujiao, who was engaged in water and land transportation. Since then, Meng Jiao settled in Luoyang lidefang. His life was a little richer by this time, and he was free from cold and hunger. Soon, however, he suffered from the loss of his son. ·

In the ninth year of Yuanhe (814), Zheng Yuqing was the Yin of Xingyuan, and Meng Jiao was the staff officer of Xingyuan army. Meng Jiao came from Luoyang.

On August 25 of the same year (September 12, 814), Meng Jiao died of severe illness in Wenxiang County, Henan Province, at the age of 64.

Literary achievements

The theme of poetry

In terms of content, Meng Jiao's poems go beyond the narrow range of subjects in Dali and Zhenyuan times. Although the main theme of his poems is the resentment of the middle and lower class literati towards poverty, which is determined by his repeated trials, hard official career, middle-aged bereavement of his son and other life experiences, he can still see some broader social life through his personal fate, and reflect these lives through his poems. Some of them expose and criticize the ugly phenomena in social interpersonal relations, while others sharply reveal the inequality between the rich and the poor. For example, in the song of the common people in the cold area, there is a contrast between "beating the bell to drink in the high hall, cooking the cannon at dawn" and "frost blows through the four walls, and pain can't escape." Zhifu CI describes the abnormal phenomenon of Zhifu "how to weave Pu Su and wear blue clothes".

He often has a profound psychological experience in writing such poems, such as the sentence "the cold is willing to be a moth and burn Bihua ointment" in the song of the common people in the cold area, which is not comparable to the general description of the sufferings of the people. It should be said that after Du Fu, Meng Jiao once again revealed the contradiction between the rich and the poor and the great disparity between the bitter and the happy in his poems. Meng Jiao's other poems describe the ordinary love of human relations, such as the love between husband and wife in jieai, the love between father and son in Xingshang, and the love between mother and son in youziyin. These themes have been ignored by poets for a long time.

Poetic thought

Meng Jiao took over the banner of retro in the hands of Yuan Jieyi school, and continued to publicize his thoughts of retro in social thought and political thought. He preached benevolence, justice and morality, praised the ancient style of Yao and Shun, criticized the trend of the times and rebellious behavior, and showed the attitude of a great gentleman everywhere. He took a non cooperative attitude towards the times and customs: "shame and new learning tour, willing to unite the ancient peasants." Most of the bureaucrats and friends he made, such as Zheng Yuqing, were moral minded and conservative. He flaunted that "he is a gentleman, but always a gentleman's knowledge", which mainly contains the will of a bosom friend who does not keep up with the times and customs, but only pursues the restoration of the old ways. His thoughts and actions of defending and practicing Tao are similar to the "Tao" advocated by Han Yu, and his life criterion is just the practice of Han Yu's "Tao" in social life. Meng Jiao not only cherishes the ancient way in his life, but also advocates it in his works. His creative purpose of "reinforcing the style of education" and "proving the rise and fall" is consistent with Chen Yuanjie's principle of "the way of emperor's disorder is the stream of the ancients' Satire", and with Bai Juyi's principle of "no empty words, no empty sentences" Only songs and people's diseases can be understood by the emperor. The creation theory of "mother", "articles written in accordance with the times, songs and poems written in accordance with the events" is consistent. Therefore, although Meng Jiao did not directly participate in Han Yu's ancient prose movement, nor did he intervene in politics with the style of straightforward satire and remonstrance, as Bai Juyi did under the distinct literary principles, he went along the road of restoring the ancient road, rectifying the imperial platform, Chunhua folk custom, and revitalizing the poetry world from the beginning to the end, and the restoration of the ancients was his fighting and spiritual weapon in this road. He is an outstanding representative of the retro trend of thought. Therefore, in the middle Tang Dynasty, when the wind of returning to the ancients was very strong, he got some praise which was impossible later.

The art of poetry

First, it is simple and dignified, avoiding familiarity and vulgarity. Meng Jiao's poetry is different from the popular shallow vulgar style at that time. It has the characteristics of simple and dignified, and creates a fresh artistic effect in the simple nature. Meng Jiao used to draw a line in white, "Luoqiao wanwang" said: "the ice under Tianjin bridge is beginning to settle, and the people on the street in Luoyang are unique. Yu Liu Xiaoshu Pavilion leisure, the moon straight see Songshan snow "pen high simple, has always been praised. "The Nanshan mountains block the heaven and earth, and the sun and moon rise on the stone. It's a broad realm to stay in the sun at night at the peak and not clear at night in the deep valley. In the sentence structure, Meng Jiao avoided gentle flow, broke the Convention, and tried to break the ancient style, taking the ancient syntax as the poem. Different from the habit of "two up and three down" in five character poetry, Meng's poetry has four up and four down sentences, such as "hiding thousands of search, distributing water, producing eighteen eminent monks" (one of the two hermits of Huainan mountain), "grinding a piece of rock, writing eternal glory" (the fourth of the ten poems of Diaoyin), which changes the traditional expression of poetry and gives people a fresh artistic feeling.

Second, it is dangerous and difficult. Think hard. Meng Jiao's poems are hard words and hard words, such as death, cutting, burning, bone, recording, folding, breaking and saving, which create a strange artistic feeling. On the one hand, it has something to do with his depression. In the novel "night feeling, he said that he" never stops studying at night and worries about ghosts and gods. How not to be idle, the heart and the body are enemies. To write poems painstakingly, it is necessary for Taoists to seek new words and sentences, and use the remote words and cold images rarely seen in the past poems. However, due to the psychological depression and injustice, the new language expression he pursues has the color and meaning of cold, desolate and withered, so as to depict the inner sorrow as deeply as possible and frighten people's hearts. In these poems, he carefully selects the poems The verbs such as "zhe", "Shu", "Yin" and "brush" are matched with dark, cold, withered and hard images such as "qiefeng", "Laochong", "binggu", "Tiefa", "nushui", "Jinbiao", "heicao" and "Bingqian", forming a group of dangerous, stiff and difficult sentences, conveying his unspeakable resentment Sorrow.

Thirdly, it is profound, graceful and majestic. Meng Jiao didn't chant all his life, and his poems were not all hard words. Han Yu saw that he was "soft and flexible", and Su SWA loved his "contemptuous and ancient" poems. Many of Meng Jiao's poems have the characteristics of ancient lightness and elegance. They express deep and euphemistic feelings in plain poetic language. Their poems are fresh and elegant, which makes them fall into the king's life

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