Idiom Explanation:
Someone can finish a poem in seven steps. It is a metaphor for being talented and quick-witted in writing.
Pronunciation:
七步成诗
qī bù chéng shī
origin:
南朝宋·刘义庆《世说新语·文学》：“文帝尝令东阿王七步中作诗，不成者行大法；应声便为诗曰：‘煮豆持作羹，漉菽以为汁；萁在釜下燃，豆在釜中泣；本自同根生，相煎何太急！’帝深有惭色。
story:
During the Three Kingdoms period, there was a man named Cao Zhi (Zi Jian). His poems were “of a high bone quality and a magnificent diction”. The famous poet Xie Lingyun once said, “There is one stone in the world, Cao Zijian has eight buckets, I have one bucket, and today we share one bucket. It is easy to see that he was very talented.
Cao Zhi was the third son of Cao Cao, and as a child he ran around with the army until he was 13 years old, when he settled down in Yecheng. After that, he wrote poems and composed fusions with Wang Chon and Xu Gan, Chen Lin and Liu Zhen, who were famous literary scholars of the time, and his fame soon spread. Among Cao Cao’s sons, Cao Zhi was the most talented, so Cao Cao wanted to “abolish the elder and establish the younger” and make Cao Zhi the crown prince.
As the saying goes, “No one is perfect, no one is perfect”, and Cao Zhi was not a perfect person. He often made mistakes due to his good wine and capriciousness, which made Cao Cao unacceptable and disappointed Cao Zhi. However, his brother Cao Pi was good at reading people’s opinions and enlisting their support, so he was finally appointed as the crown prince. After his reign, Cao Pi was afraid that his younger brothers would compete with him for the throne, so he took the military power of his second brother Cao Chang and forced his fourth brother Cao Xiong to hang himself. Cao Pi hated him so much that he tried to harm him several times.
Once, because of a trivial matter, Cao Pi took the opportunity to order Cao Zhi to take seven steps in the hall, and then improvise a poem with the title of “Brother”, but the word “Brother” could not appear in the poem, and if he succeeded, he would kill him if he failed. Cao Zhi knew that his brother was deliberately making things difficult for him, but now that Cao Pi was the emperor, he had no choice but to obey his orders. When he thought that the person who persecuted him was his own brother, Cao Zhi felt very sad and angry. He paced around and composed a poem: “Boiling beans and burning beanstalks, beans crying in the kettle, originally born from the same root, why are they frying too fast?” When the emperor Cao Pi heard this poem, he felt ashamed and did not do anything about it, but relegated Cao Zhi to the position of Marquis of Anxiang. This is how the idiom of “Seven Steps into a Poem” came about.
Cao Zhi’s literary attainments were high, but he always wanted to do something in politics, but in this way, he would easily attract the Emperor’s suspicion and persecution. In this situation, Cao Zhi depicted a lot of beautiful women in his poems and writings. For example, in the poems “Luo Shen Fu”, “The Beautiful Woman” and “The Beautiful Woman in the Southern Kingdom”, the women are not only beautiful and talented, but also of high moral character and idealistic, as a euphemism to express his bitterness that his ambition is hard to be fulfilled.
Similar Idioms:
- 七步成章
- 才思敏捷
