Acomparison Of Autumn Images Betweeen Wei,Jin,Southern And Northern Dynasties’ Poetry And English Romantic Poetry

Throughout the ages,there are a lot of autumn-related poems at home and abroad.Many researchers have explored this topic from different perspectives.The development of poetry is closely linked with social circumstances and cultural levels.We can see that in history huge changes coincide with social and political turmoil and intellectual surges.Wei,Jin,Southern and Northern Dynasties is a time when wars often happen,three schools of thoughts scramble for growth,and men of letters struggle between world affairs and personal affairs.Similarly,English Romantic Period,more than a thousand year’s later,also undergo the repercussions of industrialization,French Revolution,and Enlightenment Movement.This paper starts with the study of the comparability between the two from the above-mentioned aspects,then deals with autumn images in Wei,Jin,Southern and Northern Dynasties English Romantic Period,and finally discusses the similarities between two cultures and the roots of their differences.Chapter 1 introduces the based literary theory and background information.The literary theory applied is Hippolyte Adolphe Taine’s three important factors—race,surroundings and epoch.And the background starts from political situation.Wei,Jin,Southern and Northern Dynasties are full of huge changes.Chinese strife and minority’s invasion causes great turmoil and unrest.English Romantic period echoes with French Revolution,the conflict between workers and capitalists,and wars with America and other European countries.The second is the prevailing thoughts of the day.Confucian doctrines begin to lose its dominant position with the development of Xuan Xue,Taoism and Buddhism.The Chinese men of letters’ self-consciousness awakes.In Britain,poets lose faith in the rationale of Enlightenment Movement and the slogan of “Liberty,Equality,Fraternity” have great influence on English Romantic poets.And they stress poets’ creative imagination,natural spontaneity and genius.Chapter 2 presents some Chinese poems and romantic poems which contain the autumn images and divides them into several themes respectively.The former one —longing for hometown,lamentation for personal aspirations and the passage of time,missing her lover and complaints of being abandoned.The latter one—objective descriptions of autumn scenes,grief for the beloved and decadence,inward peace and philosophical thought,happiness for harvest,and a symbol of power and force.Chapter 3,based on the previously mentioned poems,shows the features and cultural similarities as a whole and differences of connotations of these two periods’ poetry,following explanations from four aspects.The change of seasons for Chinese who make a living by agriculture is very important;their understanding of it is often linked with the oneness of the heaven and the human beings.They tend to think their relationship in a personal way,while westerns are disposed to interpret the world in a logical and rational way.The next point is difference in literature origin.It is acknowledged that the fountain of Chinese literature is Shi Jing,in which a lot of daily life is described,including the seasonal scenes.And Song Yu’s Lamentation of Autumn deepens this tendency.Western literature origin is Greek mythology and literature.The goddess of Horae,and Demeter are responsible for seasons and harvest respectively.The third one is about the range of meanings of autumn images.The enclosed environment and poems written only among a small circle of gentry class account for the singleness of meaning in Chinese poems.In the English Romantic period,people have opportunity of seeing a lot of new machines and things,they are more receptive to reforms and changes,and this social mobility makes them connect the current situation with poems.The last difference is aesthetics.Letters of man in Wei,Jin,Southern and Northern Dynasties tend to integrate their personal fate into nature because of the political unrest.Beauty is represented in sadness and forlornness.By contrast,for the English romantic poets,beauty lies in the spontaneous burst of emotion and imagination and the common people and common language are a major factor.They also tend to regard nature as an oasis of peace,but they divert their attention from the natural seasonal changes to more realistic things.These four aspects combined make for the huge different understanding of autumn.The last part is conclusion.A summary of the above mentioned is made and the realistic significance elucidated.The innovation of the paper is the selection and analysis of some Romantic female poems.