On a stormy night, people are scattered, and the lonely lamp still calls for selling glutinous rice balls. What festival is it about?

This poem describes the Lantern Festival.

"In the middle of the night, the wind and rain are exhausted, and the lonely lamp still calls for selling glutinous rice balls."

-Excerpted from the poem Xiao Zheng's Lotus Picking Boat written by a poet in the Song Dynasty.

The main idea of this poem is that on a stormy night, there are no pedestrians on the road, only a lonely little lamp and a person stay on the side of the road, and that person is still shouting to sell jiaozi. The whole poem expresses the loneliness, hardship and bleak fate of the people who sell glutinous rice balls.

The original poem is as follows:

The poem "Yuanxiao" competes to see the lotus boat.

Song Jiang Baishi

The Lantern Festival competes to see the lotus boat, and the BMW car picks up the cymbals;

On a stormy night, people go to the empty building, and the lonely lamp still calls for selling glutinous rice balls.

Brief analysis

The first two sentences refer to the lively atmosphere of the Lantern Festival. Lantern is full of flowers, comparable to flowers. A BMW car is a metaphor for a beautiful woman. The hairpin ornaments on her head are comparable to lanterns.

On the night of the last two sentences, all the people who came out to play were scattered, and only one solitary lamp accompanied the people who bought dumplings. It should be said that Zhumen stinks of wine and meat, and the road is freezing to death. It is a relative contrast before and after, and it also reflects the folk custom of eating glutinous rice balls during the Lantern Festival.

About the author:

Jiang Kui (Kuí) (1154-1221) was born in Poyang, Raozhou (now Poyang County, Jiangxi Province). Writers and musicians in the Southern Song Dynasty.

He is a poor boy, who has tried many times. He has never been an official all his life, and he has been wandering the rivers and lakes all his life, helping his friends by selling words for a living. He is versatile, proficient in temperament, able to compose his own music, and clear pronunciation and mellow voice. His works are famous for their ethereal subtlety. Jiang Kui is good at poetry, prose, calligraphy and music, and is another rare artistic all-rounder after Su Shi.

Jiang Kui's ci has a wide range of themes, such as feeling of time, lyricism, chanting things, love, writing scenery, remembering trips, arranging festivals, making friends and giving gifts. In his poems, he expressed that although he was in the Jianghu, he never forgot the feelings of the monarch and the minister and the thoughts of harming the heavens and the earth, described his wandering life, and expressed his depressed mood of being unworthy of the world and frustrated in love, as well as his transcendent and refined character like a lonely cloud and wild crane. Jiang Kui lived in the West Lake at night and was buried in Ximacheng. Many books have been handed down, including Poems of Taoist White Stone, Songs of Taoist White Stone, Continued Book Score and Jiang Tieping.