Could The Spring Be Waited For A Long Winter?

An ideal is the people's magnificent imagination in the future. The romantic poets are generally extremely idealistic and the romantic ideals are the main ontents they express in their poems. Shelley, a British poet, regarded the realization of equality, liberty and fraternity as his life pursuit. He foretold : " If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? " However, Xu Zhi-mo, a Chinese poet, considered "love, liberty and beauty " as his highest goal. He ever said: "An ideal is our belief and our criterion for hard work as well". He wrote poems to express his ideals because "poems are the tools to describe the beautiful things in the world."In the poems, Shelley and Xu Zhi-mo always tried their best to convey their ideals in life and society. Shelley praised Apollo, who was in charge of justice and light, and demonstrated his pursuit in life, hoping that he would bring benefit to mankind just like Prince Athanase. Xu Zhi-mo looked forward to the levelof being remote and quiet, advocating a poetical life. In the social ideals, they demonstrated not only their concerns about the social matters but also their strong political inclinations, thus specifying the ocial ideals into the political ones. Shelley's poems were the fighting songs to expose the dark society and sing the praises of democracy and freedom. They were filled with the spirit of combating autocracy and tyranny and with the ideal of looking forward to liberty and happiness. In his poems, Xu Zhi-mo ridiculed and castigated forcefully the injustice in the society, showing his great sympathy for the working people and his strong hatred for the social confusions. The relation between the "baby" and the lying-in woman inhispoem was a symbol for the brignt ideal in the future and the background of the times.But their ideals were established on the basis of the personal emotions and imaginations without the revolutionary practice, so they were only "empty fantasies ".The two poets were similar in the styles of writing, too. They were both good at borrowing nature and love to eulogize their ideals. They lauded the nature and love in order to extol the ideals in their minds . They thought that the real society was quiteirty. They hoped that their souls would be purified and that their personalities would be distilled. Therefore, they often entrusted intelligence and vitality to the vast nature and sang freely for glorious ideals like birds. The great nature in Shelley's poems was the power of freedom, so he praised the human's characteristics as the spirit of nature. Xu Zhi-mo thought of the great nature as " an excellent book", so he often selected winds, clouds, grass and the moon, etc. to describe his ideals. They still took the beautiful ladies as the images to display the nobleness hi the mind and the pursuit of ideals. Shelley's love was "like a moth flying to stars". But Xu Zhi-mo's love was "the vitality of mankind as well as the center and the cream in life".In fact, their ideals were related with the turbulent societies they had ever lived in. Shelley saw clearly the cruelty of the ruling class. He considered that the present situation of people's exploitation and the social phenomenon of injustice ought to be changed. Therefore, he wrote poems to call on people to fight, wishing to build up a society where everyone would have human rights. On the other hand, Xu Zhi-mo's living time was a period in China from a closed society to a modern one. Under the oppression from home and abroad, he experienced the cruelty of feudal shackles and the constraint of his own feelings. He believed that it was his duty given by the era to change the society and voice his lofty ideals. Moreover, there were also certain philosophic roots in the poets' ideals. Shelley accepted Platonistic theory of "ideas" since he was willing to change the present society. Spinozistic pantheism went into his poems in the same way. The formation of Xu's ideals was relevant not only to the Western philosophic thoughts such as Spinozistic pantheism and so on and but to...