白居易诗
Poems of Bai Juyi
Index
慈乌夜啼
Gentle Crow Nightly Wails
|
慈乌失其母 哑哑吐哀音 昼夜不飞去 经年守故林 |
This gentle crow misses his mother, Crying aloud in a mournful voice. Day and night, he keeps his perch. For years he has guarded this old grove. |
|
夜夜夜半啼 闻者为沾襟 声中如诰诉 未尽反哺心 |
Each night, half the night he wails Until you join him, tears running down your face. Amid his cries, you hear him say, he has Yet to finish repaying the heart that fed him. |
|
百鸟岂无母 尔独哀怨深 应是母慈重 使尔悲不任 |
These other birds, don't they have a mother? Does only this one deeply feel his grief? A mother's gentle love should be repaid. Do this instead of giving grief free rein. |
|
昔有吴起者 母殁丧不临 嗟哉斯徒辈 其心不如禽 |
In the Warring States, there was Wu Qi, who Couldn't be bothered to mourn his mother. We can now lament this modern generation of his imitators Whose hearts are not equal to those of beasts. |
|
慈乌复慈乌 鸟中之曾参 |
This gentle crow restores the gentility of crows. Among crows, he is as Kongzi's disciple, Zeng Shen. |
-- 白居易
废话
I believe this poem is about government reforms in the late Tang and Bai Juyi's disapproval of them. I think this poem is an oblique criticism of those in power and possibly not a poem he shared beyond his friends.
Wu Qi (吴起) was an excellent military strategist who was eventually made Prime Minister of the State of Chu (楚). He preserved that country militarily and then instituted reforms to correct the corruption in Chu's court. He dismissed incompetent officials and moved competent ones out of the city to the borders. This weakened their power at court and strengthened the state at its edges. Politically and militarily, his radical reforms worked. They also made him a boatload of enemies.
It was said that not only did he not mourn his mother, which was a three year task not easily fit into a period of reform, but also murdered his wife, the daughter of a neighboring state's noble, in order to gain the trust of his king. These may or may not have been the slanders of his enemies. In the end, Wu Qi's king died, Wu Qi was murdered, and corruption returned to the court in a flood.
Bai Juyi had a sense of what China rightfully should be. Reforms which destroyed that rightfulness in order to preserve the state were, in his mind, destructive of the state in a deeper sense. To preserve China, one must preserve its principles. And the later the Tang got, the less its principles were preserved. Throughout his life, Bai Juyi was an idealist and China, as a living culture, was his ideal. I think that the mother of this poem, who deserves the repayment of her childrens' love, is Bai Juyi's ideal China.
Kongzi (孔子), by the way, is Confucius. His disciple, Zeng Seng (曾参) is said to have written the Classic of Filial Piety (孝經).