Ai Qing: A Modern Poem Rooted in Earth

In the course of Chinese modern new poetry's development, Ai Qing was a poet linking the preceding and the following. He fully absorbed the liveliness and freedom of vernacular new poetry since the May 4th Movement, created the unique framework of prose beauty featuring inner precision and harmony, and made positive contributions to modern new poetry's constant development.

Ai Qing (1910-1996), a native of Jinhua, Zhejiang Province, was born in a landlord family but was breast-fed by a poor countrywoman. This special life experience exerted profound and major influence on the formation of Ai Qing's personality and his later poetry creation. Ai Qing liked fine arts in his childhood, studied painting at the National West Lake Academy of Art in Hangzhou at first, and then went to France under a work-study program. In Paris, French and European impressionistic paintings, especially the works of later impressionist masters such as van Gogh characterized by intense display of colors and creative expression of subjective feelings, not only influenced Ai Qing's painting, but also influenced his later poetry creation. While studying in France, Ai Qing extensively read many Western poets' works. Verhaeren was among the poets who influenced Ai Qing the most.

Ai Qing returned to China in early 1932, and was arrested and put into prison for joining the Left Wing Artist Association and participating in progressive activities in Shanghai. Ai Qing began to write poems in prison. After being released from prison, Ai Qing published his first poetry collection Dayanhe at his own expenses. Ai Qing's most influential representative work Dayanhe - My Wet-Nurse in it established his fame. This is an autobiographical lyric poem with the poet's childhood nurse Dayanhe as the protagonist, eulogizing Dayanhe's excellent character of steadfastness, tolerance, plainness and kindheartedness with infinite compassion and deep love, depicting her life of poverty and humiliation, and powerfully cursing the old world full of crime. Dayanhe is a precious artistic model of Chinese countrywomen depicted in new poems, and her fate was the common tragic fate of all oppressed countrywomen in China. Ai Qing associated Dayanhe's fate with the fates of innumerable people like her: "Dedicated to all of them on earth, the wet-nurses like my Dayanhe, and all their sons."

Dayanhe - My Wet-Nurse is an unrhymed free-style poem written in pure spoken language without artificially arranged rhymes, moving people with candid and sincere feelings. However, Ai Qing paid attention to use of parallelism and repetition, formed a rhythm of emotional change, gave the poem a strong melody and sense of rhythm, and achieved the artistic effect of soul-stirring and lingering charm.

Around the outbreak of the War of Resistance against Japan, Ai Qing actively engaged in the movement of saving the nation from extinction and created nearly 100 poems in several years. Perhaps because Ai Qing was influenced by Van Gogh, many of his poems eulogize the sun. The Sun is the most representative one among them, showing the poet's conviction in the forthcoming revitalization of the nation and human happiness bound to be achieved. The Sun with great passion, firm faith and unrestrained spirit gives overwhelming, thunderous and powerful momentum to the sun, and truly expresses the "voice of the times:" the great revitalization of the Chinese nation.

However, Ai Qing was not a blindly optimistic poet. His joy and firmness coexisted with grief, indignation and melancholy. In the War of Resistance against Japan, he travelled to most parts of the country, saw the cruel reality of war, witnessed the misery of destitute and homeless Chinese laboring people in war, and felt the nation was at the verge of extinction. The works written in this period including The Woman Mending Clothes, Beggar and Wheelbarrow mostly have strong melancholy color.

Ai Qing consciously pursued prose-style poetry, specially emphasized new poetry's "prose beauty," opposed those flowery words and sentence structures, and thought prose-style language should be used to capture real poems in life. Ai Qing's poems are also highly impressionistic thanks to his great accomplishments in fine arts. He was good at using colors, exaggerating lights as well as picture and line arrangements to enhance images' distinctiveness. Though the images depicted by him were from real life, he often used novel metaphors and abundant imaginations to make the images generated by him more appropriate than real life. Wheelbarrow is an example of perfect integration of scenes, feelings, lights, colors, pictures and even sounds in Ai Qing's poetry:

In the territory where the Yellow River once flowed,

In numberless dried-up riverbeds,

The wheelbarrow, With its single wheel,

Lets out a squeal that shakes the lugubrious sky,

Piercing the wintry chill, the desolate stillness.

From the foot of this mountain

To the foot of that mountain,

The sound cuts right through

The sorrow of the northern people.

On frost-bitten, snow-chilled days,

In and around destitute little villages,

The wheelbarrow, With its solitary wheel,

Carves out its deep ruts in the pale-yellow layers of earth,

Cutting through the vastness and the desolation,

From this road To that road, It knits together

The sorrow of the northern people.

Ai Qing's poems can never be separated from land, which supports all his poems like faith. Therefore, Ai Qing is reputed as "Land Poet." I Love This Land written in 1938 clearly reveals the poet's deep and warm feeling toward the motherland:

If I were a bird,

I would sing with my hoarse voice

Of this land buffeted by storms,

Of this river turbulent with our grief

Of these angry winds ceaselessly blowing,

And of the dawn, infinitely gentle over the woods...

— Then I would die

And even my feathers would rot in the soil.

Why are my eyes always brimming with tears? Because I love this land so deeply...

Ai Qing's promotion of modern new poetry was manifested in two aspects: first, in terms of poems' emotional connotations, Ai Qing was always concerned about the nation's future and fate in writing poems and at the same time extended his vision to the whole humanity's future and fate, showing the poet's broad mind; second, in terms of poems' artistic forms, Ai Qing fully absorbed various accomplishments of world poetry in writing poems and at the same time always kept artistic expressions deeply rooted in his nation's soil. He used the "reed flute brought back from Europe" to play music with strong national flavor.