A Tang Dynasty poet named Zhang Youyou wrote a poem called "Yong Snow": "The country is in general, the wellhead is black, the yellow dog is white, and the white dog is swollen." All the words used are slang, and they are intended to be humorous, and sometimes imply ridicule. Later generations call this The poems are limericks.
Numbers, although they are boring, monotonous, and boring things, are symbols that represent the number of records. They often exist in our social life. Literature such as poetry is a reflection of life, so it has also entered a large number of literary works, poems, songs and poems. Numbers are originally objective. After entering literary works, they are associated with various specific and vivid things, and they have various emotional colors. Often achieve unexpected results. Either elegance, exaggeration, emphasis, association, or specificity. Once written into poetry, as long as it is used appropriately, it can often achieve artistic effects that are vivid, poetic, and full of emotion. And this is true in limericks. It is particularly prominent and can add humor and irony to the poem.
For example, Li Dazhao's limerick "Bodhisattva":
Silent, dull eyes, not eating three meals a day, weak limbs,
The five senses are not golden, the six relatives are not dependent, the seven orifices are blocked, the eight directions are majestic,
Nine (long) sitting If you don't move, ten (actually) is useless.
This poem, by accurately describing the image of the Bodhisattva as a human being, and connecting various organs and behavioral characteristics with numbers, it immediately brings the reader's inner feelings closer, causing people to make associations that extend downward consciously or unconsciously. Desire can well connect the work with the readers. It is not blunt or abrupt, so it resonates and effectively satirizes the vanity of the feudal idols that people worship.
There are quite a few doggerel poems containing numbers, and the main forms are as follows:
1. Allocation of numbers
For example: before liberation, the currency depreciated every day and prices rose daily. There was a poem in Chongqing Evening News describing primary and secondary schools. Doggerel about a teacher's life:
Wearing cheap cloth, sleeves of chalk dust, not having enough to eat three meals a day, frowning all the time, getting up at the fifth watch, asking you to play in the sixth class, seven days a week, traveling around a few times, no salary for nine days, All ten families had no food to eat.
This poem uses parallel numbers. The natural numbers from one to ten follow in sequence, serving as the leader of each sentence, making the tone of the poem coherent. These numbers are used naturally and deftly, and the images are vivid. The reader becomes an insider in the series of numbers, feels the same, and has the urge to complete the poem in one go, adding infinite fun to the poem. The reader will be left with a "tearful smile."
Another example is a limerick written by Gao Chengzuo, a professor at Sun Yat-sen University:
Ninety can be considered old, eighty is not uncommon, seventy is rare, sixty is little brother, four Fifteen and ten crawl all over the floor, and twenty and thirty sleep in the cradle.
This poem is humorous, and the arrangement of numbers strongly expresses the author's precious feelings of dissatisfaction with old age. It has the slang flavor of folk songs.
Let’s read another song on the Internet: One network is deeply in love, two people are talking about the sky. Three rivers ride together on the waves, and four seas cross with the same boat. The five mountains are intoxicating with their songs, and the poems from the six directions are fresh. Who is more troubled by the seven emotions, I am especially troubled by the eight worries. The moon is held in the sky for nine days, and the sword is sharpened in ten years.
This article is also through the continuous use of ten concrete things that can be seen everywhere in our lives, to use numbers to implicate the scenery, and then to associate emotions through the scenery, with clear context and natural foreshadowing, to achieve a natural, no sense of isolation, as if that Even if you are writing for yourself, you can write such poems, and these are precisely the skills of a writer.
2. Concatenated numbers
For example: Zheng Banqiao, one of the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou, wrote a limerick "Song of Snow":
One piece, two pieces, three or four pieces, five, six, seven, eight or ninety pieces, thousands of pieces, countless pieces, flying in The plum blossoms are all gone.
This poem is a series of numbers. The first three sentences of the poem are all composed of numbers, describing the process of snowflakes growing from small to large, from near to far, and finally to numerous and numerous. In fact, it is a process of a realm from subtle to magnificent, causing a wandering mind. Flying, the effect of magnifying the horizons, provides a strong foundation for the last sentence of "Flying into the sky, all the plum blossoms are gone".
Something similar to this is the limerick "Ode to the Sparrow" written by another poet in the Qing Dynasty: "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight or ninety, eating all the royal millet, how little is the phoenix?" "How many?"
Again, there are four or five houses in Yancun within two or three miles. There are six or seven pavilions. Eighty or ninety flowers.
The poet simply and directly arranged the ten Chinese characters representing numbers from one to ten in a natural order, describing the road, smoke, mountain villages, pavilions, and flowers together. With the natural arrangement of the poems and pictures, the composition was composed with only a few strokes. A natural, simple and familiar mountain village scene is very interesting. The twenty-cross poem uses ten numbers to outline an enchanting mountain village scenery painting that is unforgettable, natural and harmonious.
Before liberation, the cars we rode in were prone to accidents. Sometimes they would break down shortly after driving and were difficult to repair. To this end, someone wrote a limerick and published it in the newspaper:
I went two or three miles and stopped four or five times.
has been repaired six or seven times, and has been recommended by eighty or ninety people.
This poem consists of ten numbers in a series, advancing layer by layer. It uses humorous language to mock the backwardness of transportation in old China.
3. Interleaved numbers
For example, in the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang once drank with his Hanlin scholars and wrote a poem titled "The Golden Rooster croaks the dawn" to celebrate the Year of the Rooster. The cock crows twice and pouts twice, and calls out the fusang sun three times, sweeping away the remaining stars and the dawn moon.
The numbers inserted in the middle of this limerick complement each other and create a sense of frustration. They also have a sense of mechanical cycle, making the poem popular and humorous.
"Digital Magician":
One becomes two, two becomes three, digital magic is amazing: there is only one flower in the field, but ten flowers are written on the paper; you want an output value of 300 million nine, I can conjure nine hundred and eighty. Chickens can lay eggs and hatch chickens, and money can also lay eggs. Reasonable estimates are well-founded, realistic and not exaggerated. The rise of an unknown person to a high position depends entirely on this trick. Oops, today China is cracking down on counterfeiting, and false reporting violates the statistical law. It's time to play with numbers, and the magic master throws away his veil.
"Digital Magician" cleverly satirizes the bad phenomenon of statistical data falsification before the implementation of the "Statistics Law" by inserting numbers.
Looking at the above, we can clearly see that numbers are boring symbols. However, if these same boring numbers are arranged by poets with ingenuity and cleverness, they will become lively and vivid one by one. , giving people a beautiful enjoyment. The appropriate use of numbers in limericks can not only make the poem vivid and compact in structure, but also enhance the comic beauty and comedy of the poem, achieving excellent artistic effects.
