Chinese poem illustration: 郑风 出其东门/ Zheng Wind – Out of the East Gate by Anonymous

郑风 出其东门

Zheng Wind was described as erotic(郑风淫) by Song scholars(宋儒) which actually derived from the words of Confucius: Zheng voice is erotic or excessive(郑声淫) not the poetry! Furthermore no one is sure which Confucius refers: erotic or excessive by the character 淫.

A new arguement of this poem is developed by carefull study of the key words 缟衣 綦巾 娱. The word 闉闍(yin1du1) is aslo a key indicator of the cemetery site by its ancient form, which consist of the radicals of west land(垔) and bow/Condolence(弔or弓). The radical of west land means a bump of earth, is aslo used in the character 禋(禋于六宗) which is a ceremony for the ancestors. The unusual structure of 2 paragraphs is also a indicator of something negative. Normally the Wind poem is of 3 paragraphs.

New observation after one more year of this video: 匪我思存/匪我思且 means the people look down on my ritual/behavior of ancestor worship, thus I(poet) managed to have music/entertainment with them reluctantly.

郑风 出其东门
佚名

出其东门,有女如云。
虽则如云,匪我思存。
缟衣綦巾,聊乐我员。

出其闉闍,有女如荼。
虽则如荼,匪我思且。
缟衣茹藘,聊可与娱

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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