Among the existing Tang poems, many are devoted to litchi. In the Tang Dynasty, Bai Juyi, Xu Yin and Xue Neng were especially good at writing litchi poems.
Ceng Yun, Wang Shizhen in Qing Dynasty: "Bai Letian and Su Zizhan are vivid for litchi. This shows how important Bai Juyi is to the development of litchi, a poetic image. Bai Juyi's litchi poem Eighteen Rhymes has described this "exotic fruit of the South China" very delicately. Its poem says: "The exotic fruit sticks to the exotic fruit in the south, and the fragrant forest faces the Beitang. Spring is stranger, summer is stranger. The leaves hang down the door and the branches press against the wall. At first, because of the wind, it gradually won glory with Japan. At night, I was so scared that I hung on fire and put on makeup in the tree. Deeper than a red dragonfly, betel nut. The stars are connected and the beads are bright. Ziluo shears the lining shell, and white jade wraps the pulp. I heard about it at an early age. Let's try it now. Chew the taste of heaven and smell the fragrance of a different world. Runsheng lotus water is fresher than orange cream. Swallow a stick in your hand, and the nectar is in your tongue. Things are rare, and the sky is high. It teaches students to live in summer, but it also hinders them. The essence of liquid is hard to stay in, and Yan Zi is tender and easy to get hurt. It's hot in the south, but it's far to the north. It is not allowed to fill in the tribute of the king, and there is no reason to send it to the emperor's hometown. Only you can throw gifts. Your face is as white as Pan Lang. It's really delicious, and my mouth is watering in the middle of reading it. The old man has a deep love for Litchi Chung, and has a gift of "I can't leave this gentleman for one day". He once planted litchi trees by himself, and wrote a poem in Planting Litchi: "The red pearl is sincere and lovely, and the white beard is too defensive. Ten years later, we knew who was there, and we planted lychees from the palace. " Poetry contains the feeling that the world is vast, and the infatuation with litchi makes people's nose sour. Not only that, the old man also "loves my house and my dog". He sent litchi to his friend Yang Bajijun twice, which aroused Yang Jun's idea of growing litchi himself. Unexpectedly, the old man also wrote a poem to mock him kindly: "The fragrant green leaves are really picturesque, and the red and green cages are really pitiful. I heard that Wanzhou will plant it, and I am worried about which year you will eat it. 」
Xu Yin is more unique. He is good at expressing the artistic conception of leisure and indifference with litchi, even if it is unique in ancient and modern times. There is a cloud in the poem "A Lonely Tour in a Hometown": "The fish are shocked to throw violet, and the birds peck red lychee. There is also a saying in "Partridge": "Litchi has no interpersonal relationship when it is first ripe, and it pecks through red buds and falls to Irinoda. "With these two couplets, I'm afraid it is well-deserved to give Xu Yin a nickname" Xu Lizhi ". In addition, he also wrote two "Seven Laws of Litchi", which described Litchi to the best of his ability. Among them, there are many beautiful sentences, such as "the dragon shell bursts with red millet, and the fish eye contains white membrane pulp", "The ghost crow pecks the golden drop of Joan, and the jewel brings the belly of a round clam" and "Who stabs the gorilla blood and stains the tendon all over the shell", just like peeling off the litchi shell layer by layer. How wonderful it is to read Xu Yin's poems and be a diners of classical literature!
Xue Neng's litchi poems have the characteristics of both Bai poetry and Xu poetry. The cloud "Litchi House" and "Litchi Poems" all have the flavor of Bai Juyi relying on litchi to express human sadness. There is a saying in "Leaving a Title" that "tea revives the poetic mind and will be sung once in a while. When sugar cane is cold in spring and litchi is deep in the rain, the charm of Xu Yin's poetry is shown through litchi. Zheng Gu, a native of the Tang Dynasty, said in the poem Reading Snow in Xuchang Shangshu that he "recited litchi rain and begonia spring", which is a recognition of his litchi poems.
Litchi reflects homesickness
As Cai Xiang's Litchi Tree said, "Litchi is the only thing in the world that exists in Fujian, Guangdong, South Guangdong and Bashu. In the early Han Dynasty, Wang Wei of South Vietnam made preparations for this, so he began to communicate with China. As a local landscape, litchi can best reflect the local characteristics, and it entered the field of vision of the Tang Dynasty, mostly because of this. The farewell poems in the Tang Dynasty pay most attention to the description of things to express the characteristics of time and space. Poems involving Lingnan, central Fujian and Sichuan naturally occupy a place.
Xue Tao, a poetess living in Shu, wrote "Remembering Litchi", one of the seven quatrains, but she wrote litchi in Lingnan: "It is said that the county and the south are separated by a barren land, which is unforgettable. Near Tsing Yi, there is even Chu water, and the vegetarian pulp is as sweet as dew. I'm afraid it's also a yearning for Sichuan litchi. Du Fu's poems are not as far away as the mountains and rivers of female poets. He missed Shu, so he wrote lychee in Shu: "I remember picking lychees in Lurong, and the green peaks reflected the rocks." "In Beijing, the old ones don't look good, and the red ones only know the sweetness. The greatness of Du Fu's poems has been fully demonstrated in just four sentences, recalling the past without staying at the emotional origin, like litchi, but not just staying in the situation of litchi, and ending the sentence with a life sigh like "drinking water, thinking about the source, knowing yourself in cold and warm". At this point, tasting litchi is more enjoyable than our greedy plan, which is obviously much more profound. Zheng Gu will go to Luzhou, Sichuan, where he will meet Mr Pei and live in exile in Suizhou. As a result, the old friend talked about the past, which was infinitely bleak: "In the past year, * * * looked at the shadow of Songxi, and there was no monk in Songzhe River. Today, I remembered what happened in Chengdu. I will spend some time in Xie Meng. When you get divorced, you get old, and when you retire completely, you get lonely. I'll go south again. When the lychee is ripe in spring, I'll go to Chongqing. The poem is full of the feelings of the troubled times between heaven and earth, blending the chaos of the times and the experience of life. The season of "litchi ripens in spring" is another expression of Du Fu's poem "Falling Flowers" (Du Fu's "On Meeting Li Guinian Downstream"), which makes people cry and hate it.
Compared with reminiscence poems, litchi is more brilliant in farewell poems in Tang Dynasty. In ancient times, the origin of litchi belonged to the frontier and it was a long way. When an old friend goes, it is inevitable to worry that "you must leave me here and drift away. When can we meet again?" Moreover, due to the bad weather, Han Yu was banished to Chaozhou and even told to "take my bones to the river." How to comfort travelers? Su Dongpo said that "300 lychees a day, I don't want to grow up to be a Lingnan person", which is undoubtedly a kind of masturbation, and he just inherited the image of the farewell poem in Tang Dynasty to comfort people with lychees. There is nothing at the border, only litchi is good.