心有事 The Heart Has Its Cares

What it’s about

This opening song turns private trouble into a landscape. The speaker cannot ask heaven for an answer and cannot sleep because sorrow is pent up in the chest. His spirit drifts like the last smoke leaving a mountain cave, while memories loosen tears like pearls from a broken string. Empty mountain is at once witness and companion: it supplies its own streaming rain until human tears and weather become indistinguishable, then join a sea large enough to drown the whole country.

The poem's most surprising turn comes when the ancient bird Jingwei appears, still trying to fill the sea that killed her. The speaker does not praise that heroic persistence without reserve. He advises the grieving bird to freeze the sea into iron instead, so that the two of them may stand opposed upon it in silence. Sorrow moves through several impossible transformations—pearls into arrows, arrows into springs, tears into rivers, sea into ice—without being resolved. The result is a compact ars poetica for the collection: emotion takes emblematic natural forms, yet the emblems preserve frustration rather than curing it.

When it was written 背景

Subtitled 開卷底歌聲, “the song at the opening of the book,” this lyric acts as a second preface after 弁言. Its imagery draws on classical poetry and mythology even though its grammar is broadly vernacular. Jingwei comes from the 山海經: after drowning, the emperor's daughter becomes a bird that endlessly carries twigs and stones to fill the eastern sea. 赤縣 is an old literary name for China, so the flood expands personal grief into a national scale typical of writing in the unsettled early Republic. For learners, the repeated 淚, 雨 and 海 provide a clear chain through the denser allusions; read the punctuation as part of the escalating song rather than looking for a literal narrative event.