[转载]Criticizing Wen Yiduo's Dead Water

    This poem, imbued with patriotism, expresses his great concern for his motherland. One can feel his romantic fantasy and flame of volcanic passion, touched with a tinge of grief and wrath. The metaphor and imagery reflect his view of China at that time when poverty, injustice, and warlords swayed. The  cadence  and irony he employs bespeak his desperation, indignation, and suspicion of any national leader who might come to power.

     This twenty-line poem can be divided into five stanzas or three parts. The first part (the first stanza) expresses his exasperation of the corruption rampant in China, which he saw as dead water. The first line "Tis a ditch of desperate dead water" symbolizes the semi-feudal, semi-colonial, war-worn state of old China. At that time, new ideas were severely suppressed by the alliance of feudalism and imperialism though China had been opened to the outside world. That's why the poet was desperate with China, which he depicted as a ditch of dead water. In the second line, i.e. "The breeze cannot blow up half a ripple", the breeze can be compared to anything new or progressive, in contrast with "dead water", which is a metaphor of Old China. But this breeze cannot arouse any reaction from the dead water, an extreme stagnation. The third and fourth lines, "Why not throw in junk iron or copper / Or splash there odds and ends from the table" reveals the poet's disappointment and resentment of the reality and his faint hope for future at the same time.

    The second part, from the second to the fourth stanzas, is an irony  of the rottenness of old China. With his wild imagination, the poet described the changeability of the dead water. As junk iron and copper, and ends and odds from the table are thrown into the water, something happens. The iron and copper become rusty in green and red colors. The green looks like jade, and the red like peach bloom. And the grease from the odds and ends glitters like silk and some of it turns moldy, like rosy fume, and some of it gets fermented like green wine, on which are floating pearly foams. Just on such a surface mosquitoes dance and join in the croak of the frogs. This is a disgusting picture of China at that time. The jade, peach bloom, silk, pearly foams were used to describe the dirty dead water. This case is just like dressing a devil with an exquisite beautiful gown. Here we can see the poet's wit for sarcasm: When beautified, an ugly looks more ugly.

    The third part, i.e. the last stanza, expresses the poet's indemnation of the reality and his strong wish for a change. In other words, while negating old China thoroughly, he expects something to change although it is vey vague. "Let the evil spirit reclaim the land/See what world it may make, what kind of world". As you sow, so will you reap. The world reclaimed by the evil spirit should be an ugly evil world. However, when it is ugly to the extreme, something new may appear. So this part embodies his hatred for Old China, and hope for New China.

      Wen was one of the earliest poets who advanced the idea of New Metric Poetry, and this poem is an example to show what his proposal looks like.  In his Meter of Rhyme, Wen suggested that "the force of a poem does not consist  only in the beauty of music  and the beauty of painting but also in the beauty of architecture". Judging by syllables or meter, this poem is very regular, nine characters each line (pentameter through analogy) do not change while long and short pauses (iambic or trochee through analogy) change according to the mood;  in terms of resonance, it is in alternate rhyme, maculine or feminine,  as is necessary to the  prosodic arrangement.

　The beauty of architecture is obvious. The poem consists of five stanzas; each stanza consists of four lines, and each line consists of nine characters (ten syllables through analogy), well structured  and  well balanced. So is the beauty of painting. When the poet describes the dead water, he uses words that appeal to the eye, like "green into jade"," rust into peach bloom",  "the grease will weave a layer of silk", "the mildew will give off a rosy fume", which gives the poem a vivid color. And such beauty strengthens the effect of irony. 

　　 All in all, this poem can be seen as Wen's representative, a representative not long of his poems but  also of his character.