From a Poem by the Old Traitor Li Hongzhang, On the Basic Characteristics and Tricks of All Beasts in Human Clothing

"With one hand I grasp the Wu hook blade, my spirit soars above the hundred-foot tower; who writes history across ten thousand years? I seek enfeoffment eight thousand li away. I shall follow swift steeds along the road, with no idle mood to chase the water gulls! Laughing, I point at the moon over Lugou Bridge -- how many from here have reached the Isles of the Blessed?" The above is a poem by the old traitor Li Hongzhang. The pro-Li faction selected a batch of Li's poems into a collection circulating online to prove how splendid the old traitor supposedly was. This poem is the first one; the others are even worse, so let's use this as our target.

From a purely technical poetic standpoint, this poem is a complete failure. For regulated verse, repeating the same idea across multiple couplets is a cardinal sin. Clearly lacking enough material for even a quatrain yet forcing it into a regulated verse -- from this alone one can see the man's nature of bluffing and posturing. Of course, the old traitor was not known for his poetry, so I won't belabor the technical critique. Let's look at the content instead.

Ever since Old Du Fu wrote "Ascending a Tower," the opening couplets of regulated verse on similar themes have all become like this -- simply tragic. The old traitor just parrots along. Compare it with "Flowers crowd the high tower, wounding the traveler's heart; ten thousand lands in crisis, here I climb" -- the richness and depth reveal the old traitor's affectation and shallowness. The neck couplet focuses on the characters "write" and "seek." For the former, compare it with Wen Tianxiang's "leave a loyal heart to illuminate history" -- the gap in the word "illuminate" versus "write" is telling. The latter follows naturally from the former: if you want to "write" history, you naturally need to "seek" -- seek what? Enfeoffment, of course. What else could the old traitor possibly do? In the neck couplet, the old traitor's posturing becomes even more ridiculous. No leisure to chase water gulls, yet he runs off to Lugou Bridge for what? If the intent is to express rejecting the hermit life to save the people, then why emphasize seeking enfeoffment and who writes history? If you're a man of fame, fortune, and lust, just say so directly -- why drag the water gulls in as props? By the final couplet, the old traitor is fully exposed. "Laughing, I point" -- pointing for whom to see? Surely an entourage surrounds him, so what happened to "with one hand I grasp the Wu hook blade"? The earlier pose of standing alone atop the tower is completely betrayed by a single "laughing, I point." The moon over Lugou Bridge is of course not what the old traitor was following -- the dragon or phoenix in the Forbidden City is what the old traitor sought to cling to and attach himself to. And the shameless acts the old traitor committed in this pursuit are indeed few who can match.

The above analysis completely exposes the basic characteristics and tricks of all beasts in human clothing. In the Chinese tradition of so-called poetic education, the secret manual of how beasts don human clothing has long been passed down through generations. The laughable thing is that now someone is actually using the old traitor's wretched verses to make a point. The sinister intentions of such people must be guarded against.