Study Of Bai Juyi’s Poems On Flowers

Poems on flowers are one of the representative themes in Bai Juyi’s collection of poems.By inheriting poems on flowers composed by poets before Tang Dynasty, Bai Juyi composednumerous poems on flowers presenting an extremely high aesthetic level. The idea andphilosophy lying behind his poems is magnificent and comprehensive, ascending toremarkable achievements in Chinese poetry and impressing the posterity with profoundinfluences.There were over150poems on flowers composed by Bai Juyi and over30varieties offlowers were included. In the order of his preference on flowers, lotus is favored in the firstplace, followed by peach blossom, cherry blossom and rhododendron. While Bai juyi’semotional tendency is not consistent in the same flower. As to his preference on the bloomingstate of flowers, almost all the poems eulogized the blossoming flowers; poems to the fallenflowers are rare, but created with delicate, subtle and thought-provoking ingenuity. As to thegenres of his poems, a wide range of genres can be involved. As to time division of poems byBai Juyi, By using his being degraded to Jiangzhou and staying idly in Luoyang as the timeboundary, Bai Juyi’s flower poems can be divided into three stages, poems of different stageof life can reflect his psychological journey of ups and downs in his political career, andtwists and turns in emotional life.The diversified themes for poems on flowers by Bai Juyi can be classified as: eulogizingthe flowers, expressing delight in daily life, presenting and recompensing friends, comparingflowers to person, implying sarcasm on the society by resorting to flowers. His composingmotivation and emotional attributes can be analyzed by research on classified themes. Basedon his extensive social activities and diversified living experiences, his poems reflected thesocial customs, life of scholars, contacts between friends of the time, as well as his attitudetowards life and social cognition. Therefore, these poems are highly significant in cognitivevalue.The artistic value of Bai Juyi’s poems on flowers is very high owing to his diversifiedtechniques of expression, vivid and plain language, abundant vocabulary and original wording,social mores composing motivation, personality traits, aesthetic style. The ingenuity of BaiJuyi’s poems on flowers is clearly obvious in social mores, composing motivation, personalitytraits and aesthetic style by comparing with that by his peers, for instance, Li Bai, Du Fu, andLi Shangyin. It is his ingenuity and amazing aesthetic charm that enlightened and influencedthe composing of poems on flowers by his posterity. All in all, Bai Juyi enriched the theme and means of artistic expression of poems onflowers by inheriting the composing tradition of his predecessors and combining the traditionwith his personal preference and experience. As a result, he further improved the developmentof poems on flowers.