Ye Zhi: Irish Soul

I believe many of us understand and interpret Ireland through Ye Zhi. In other words, a large part of Ireland we know-that romantic, sad, mysterious and stubborn country-is Ireland in Ye Zhi's poems.

1923, Ye Zhi won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his "poems that are always full of inspiration and express the whole national spirit in a highly artistic form". His acceptance speech said: "He (Ye Zhi) still follows the spirit that led him to become an Irish interpreter earlier. For a long time, this country has been waiting for someone to give it a voice. "

So, how did Ye Zhi "give it a voice" in his poems and interpret the Irish national spirit?

No one in history has ever shaped the spiritual temperament of a country according to his own spiritual temperament like Ye Zhi.

This sounds a bit exaggerated, but after reading his poems carefully and understanding his life story, what he likes, hates, experiences and thinks, we will suddenly find an interesting phenomenon: in fact, the Irish spiritual characteristics in Ye Zhi's works are mostly his own.

When discussing Yates' character with alan fletcher, an academician of the Royal Irish Academy of Sciences and a professor of English, drama and film at the University of Dublin, he used the word "childish" more than once. The literal meaning of this word is "naive". Or, naive simplicity.

In Lissadell House in sligo, there are many photos, letters, manuscripts and books of Ye Zhi. Mr. and Mrs. Walsh, the owner of the manor, said that Ye Zhi often came to the manor to play when he was young, and became friends with the two daughters of the manor owner at that time. From the photo, Ye Ci wears glasses, with a handsome face, melancholy eyes and stubborn lips, which is very charming.

Ye Zhi is brilliant, but his temperament is extremely diverse. To sum up, his body generally presents these six contradictory temperament:

He can not only stick to the purity and loyalty of love, but also crave physical pleasure; On the one hand, he despises life and death, on the other hand, he is very afraid and disgusted to get old; He is not only addicted to the simple and quiet traditional rural life, but also willing to make friends with revolutionary leaders, always at the center of politics and revolution; While praising the courage of independents, he was gentle and restrained, and hated massacres and violent movements. His thinking about reality is cold and profound, but simple and enthusiastic, full of illusions about life; He is optimistic and romantic by nature, but there is always melancholy in his bones. ...

All kinds of entanglements are quite contradictory. As Yu Guangzhong said, to understand Ye Zhi's profundity and greatness, we must grasp the contrast in his poems, which is full of contradictions in the real world, but can be reconciled and unified in the artistic world.

Due to the strong contrast and the contradiction of Ye Zhi's personality, he shows a complex and charming temperament in general, which coincides with his peaceful, beautiful, mysterious and romantic Ireland.

1885, Ye Zhi was 20 years old.

At the age when the sun was whispering to flowers, he wrote his first poem and published it in the Dublin University Review. Years later, until his death in France on 1939, he wrote more than 400 poems.

Ye Zhi's poetry can be roughly divided into three stages:

( 1)? From 1885 to 1899, the third collection of poems, The Wind in the Reed, was published.

During this period, Ye Zhi's poems were eclectic, influenced not only by romanticism such as Shelley and Spencer, but also by Wilde's aestheticism and Blake's mysticism. At the same time, his personal exploration and reflection on Irish rural life and folk stories were integrated to get the theme from them. The representative love poems of Yeats's early period include When You Are Old, The Lover Tells the Rose in His Heart, He Remembers the Forgotten Beauty, The Wings are a Brocade of Heaven, The Rose on Earth and so on.

② From the beginning of the 20th century to the end of the First World War.

During this period, influenced by the Irish national autonomy movement, his poems began to get rid of the tendency of aestheticism and express the realistic content by symbolic means. Ye Zhi began to integrate nationalism into love poems, trying to create a national thought through writing. Ye Zhi's representative love poems in this period include Arrow, Adam's curse of love, Oh, don't love for too long, There is no second Troy, Reconciliation, Mask and so on.

(3) 19 19 to the end of 1930s.

During this period, his mysticism was prominent, he paid attention to death and love, creatively combined symbolism with realism, and integrated life philosophy with personal feelings. His famous love poems in this period include: Broken Dreams, Pleading for Love, Living Beauty, Lost Things, A Woman's Youth and Old Age, etc. .

Generally speaking, Yeats's poems are warm.

Although he tried many styles later, he never left the source of his poems, singing love and romanticism always ran through his poems. The theme of his poems is mostly the expression of personal feelings, or the feeling of hopeless love, or the thinking of life philosophy. Ye Zhi likes to use some pleasant images, such as the moon, roses, shepherds, stoves, islands in the lake, girls and children. He is good at using the technique of overlapping sentences, and the songs he sings are sonorous and beautiful. He has a strong humanistic concern, and his humble description of life and love often makes people feel that the warm autumn sun shines obliquely in their hearts, which is particularly prominent in When You Are Old and Bai Niao on the Waves. Old, warm words, lingering feelings, slow rhythm, like a violin music fluttering by the fire; Bai Niao on the waves is cheerful and bright, like a bagpipe on the Irish green grassland.

Ye Zhi's poems are getting cold again.

Many of Ye Zhi's works have tragic aesthetic thoughts. For example, the song "Cold Sky" suddenly saw the cold sky that delighted crows. It looks like ice is burning, but more ice appears, which is driven by the madness of the mind and imagination in some way. " It's hard to imagine that such a poem, cold to the bone marrow, actually comes from the mouth of such a warm person as Ye Zhi. Another example is "an Irish pilot foresaw his death". The epic destruction of pilots is no longer the simple death of individual life, but the nirvana of the whole life-and this is the hope of the whole nation. The Irish nation can find itself in this tragedy and gain a new life.

The most wonderful thing is that the coldness and warmth in Ye Zhi's poems coincide with the romance, sadness and mystery of Ireland as a whole. It seems that this country, accompanied by this poet, is rich and weak, happy and sad.

The beauty and nobility of the world have been spread in Ye Zhi.

Yates lived in a time when the Irish people were striving for independence and getting rid of British rule. According to Dr. Fhirrine Chiu of China, who studies Ireland, "In order to seek the support of farmers, the leaders of the independence movement at that time described the modern industrial city as the base camp of Protestants and British culture", and combined with writers and artists with Ye Zhi as the main force, they outlined a traditional, beautiful, poetic and self-sufficient agricultural country for Irish people, just like the first Irish President Emon? De? As amon de valera described it:

"... a country, its countryside is dotted with bright and comfortable homes, fields and villages are full of joy, the sound of labor is everywhere, strong children are playing, strong young people are competing, beautiful girls are laughing, and peaceful old people by the fire are sharing the wisdom of years. "

Does this picture sound familiar?

Remember Tao Yuanming's Peach Blossom Garden? "The land is flat and spacious, and the house is mandatory. There are fertile fields, beautiful ponds, mulberry trees and bamboo ... among them, ethnic crops, men and women wear clothes, are called outsiders. Yellow hair hangs on its head and enjoys itself "-all of them are mentioned: home, fields, villages, work, children and the elderly." ...

It turns out that for thousands of years, although Ireland and China are separated by the whole Eurasian continent, they have the same dream of the Peach Blossom Garden.

Similarly, the American poet Robert? Frost and Wordsworth, the English poet, are both pastoral poets, who advocate returning to nature and looking for people's hearts in the countryside under industrial civilization. When the world is in chaos, people always go to the countryside to seek comfort. To some extent, can it be said that the countryside is the best comforter of the human mind in the world?

Coincidentally, in various countries, this Peach Blossom Dream is outlined and described by poets. Poets are best at weaving dreams with words, which can be said to be the best at dreaming. Therefore, it is more appropriate for Ye Zhi to undertake the task of sketching the Irish national picture.

Anderson once said that the nation is a "fictional identity". "Imagination" refers to an ideal dream based on reality.

The Irish national spirit constructed by Ye Ci is based on a certain degree of imagination-he adopted a large number of Irish folk stories and legends, and combined them with the literary form of poetry to "re-imagine" and re-create these folk stories. Ye Zhi, in particular, is full of passionate imagination about the traditional society. In his poems, he used many beautiful sentences and chapters to describe the tranquility and beauty of the countryside and the noble quality of tradition. In addition, he still has deep feelings for home and country. Throughout his life, he was very close to politicians who devoted themselves to reviving Irish national culture and advocated rebuilding Catholic agricultural society-therefore, he constructed a political ideal that met the needs of the social and historical background at that time.

He advocated the revival of national culture, hoped to unify Ireland with literature, and hoped to mold a nation's soul through the Renaissance, and this nation's soul would inevitably revive a nation's great literature and art. Ye Zhi founded the Irish Literature and Art Association and the Dublin National Literature and Art Association in London, and gathered many young people into these literary and art societies. He believes that in order to unite the whole nation, it is necessary to cultivate a national culture with high aesthetic quality among the people and shape a national image with high cultural literacy. To this end, he advocated returning to ancient Ireland, returning to ancient samurai legends and folklore, looking for heroes and establishing a beautiful and unified country.

Jung said that all cultures will precipitate into personality. Ye Zhi successfully linked personal temperament with national temperament, unified artistry with nationality, expressed or constructed Ireland's overall cultural personality or national spirit with his language and imagination, and created a poetic, quiet, mysterious, romantic and contradictory Ireland.

Ye Zhi's efforts received a positive response in Ireland. Irish people began to face up to their ancestry and traditions, and some people gave up their English names to restore their surnames. The movement to resume the use of Irish has been one after another, even today, more than half a century after the founding of Ireland.

Later, someone praised him like this: "Ye Zhi has made achievements that few poets can achieve. He not only successfully maintained the relationship with the people, but also maintained the most aristocratic art. "

This is the greatest glory as a poet.

1923, Ye Zhi became the first Irish poet to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Eliot once commented on Ye Zhi, "He is the greatest English poet of our time, and can be said to be the greatest poet of any time".

1995, another Irish poet, Siemers? Seamus heaney won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The award speech is "His poems have both beautiful lyricism and theoretical thinking depth, which can extract magical imagination from daily life and revive history", which is in the same strain as Ye Zhi.

Yeats has been dead for nearly a hundred years. Those poets and writers in Ireland have always said that imagination is created by imagination and light is reflected by light, which continues the immortal legend of Ireland. (Text/Xia Ling)

We stare at the Irish 1 Ye Zhi's lifelong dream.

Ireland in Ye Zhi-a sad and beautiful girl.

Ye Zhi's Irish 3- A Myth Rooted in the Earth