On The Relationship Between Gong Zizhen's Poem And His Personality

This article chiefly discusses the relationship between Gong Zizhen' s poems and his personality in three sections.The first section throws light on the reason for the building-up of Gong Zizhen's personality. Personality is a complex dynamic system. It is built up for internal as well as external reasons. Firstly, times and tradition, as the external reason plays an important role in building up his personality. This article, beginning with the trend of thought in Jiaqing and Daoguang' s time in the Qing Dynasty, displays three sources of Gong Zi-zhen's ideas: textual research, Jinwen scriptural study and personality liberation, which form the basis of Gong Zizhen's ideas through effective selection and combination. Gong Zizhen's personality is typically traditional, which originates from Wei and Jin period when personality was a join-up from Zhuang Zhou, Qu Yuan and the Confucianist. Emotion as centre, it pursues personality independence and liberty. On the surface, it' s evidently characterized by Zhuang Zhou and Qu Yuan, but in fact by Confucianist. Heir of independence and emotion of early Wei and Jin period and successor of personality liberation of the late Ming Dynasty, Gong Zi-Zhen, acting on the calls of time, accomplished the transition from Ancient Times to Modern Times as the last link in the chain of personality development. Secondly, the internal reasons like biology, psychology and grinding experience of life have the decisive effect on the building-up of personality. Gong Zizhen' s being sentimental owes to love for his mother and incarnation of feelings of life. His open and pure character forms on the one hand from his nature and on the other hand from his superior living condition, which makes him open and frank with "childlike innocence" beyond pretension. Deep in his sentimental and pure, he developed Theory of Childlike Innocence and On Respecting Sentiment, and on this basis, he put forward Respect Heart , only to protect self-dignity as a human being and give a forceful blow to the binding theory of Song and Ming Dynasty. Family trained him to be talented and ambitious while cruelreality ruined that. This misfortune resulted from his arrogance in personality and intolerance of the rotten society. Frustration made him lonely, sad, and rebellious in personality.The second section tells about the relationship between his idea in the poems and his personality. The internal logic in Gong Zizhen' s psychological process is: anxiety -puzzle -contradiction-surmount. These four factors interact and influence each other. Firstly, dissatisfactions with himself and self-inquiry on this led him to anxiety which lay in his preference for nights and dreams as well as in a religious self-inquiry. Secondly, anxiety is followed by puzzle coming from his doubt on his views of the world .This puzzle has some relation to his open nature and style which is relation to his personality such as innocence and liberty. This puzzle pressed him to look into life, discover the nature of society and sense the true meaning of life. Thirdly, anxiety and puzzle is some kind of contradictory feeling, His self-inquiry is liable to experience to self-split which results in his contradictory mind and behavior. The contrast between sword and flute in the poems is a reflection of this contradiction, which lies in a choice in life, to be keenly progressive or to be escapist. Fourthly, anxiety .puzzle and contradiction made Gong Zizhen upset, whereas walking in the liberty of poems he reverted to "childlike innocence" . He went out of his way to view the world and pursue its truth, thus comforting his uneasy soul and surmounting his pains. Gong's poems showed a fantastic description which reflected this surmount. Viewing totally the logic structure of psychology and the expressions in poems, we find their common characteristics: All contains an experience of self-acknowledge . It is an attitude as well as a mode to transfer subjective to objective. Depending on this, he observes and describes thing as a participant inst...