A Maze of Stars (Fanxing) and Spring Water (Chunshui), are two collections of poetry written by Bing Xin.
Bing Xin was one of the first writers to use the short poem structure in a poetry book and she was inspired by Rabindranath Tagore's work Stray Birds.
She acknowledged his influence over her writing style in her introductory essay, "How I Wrote A Maze of Stars and Spring Water" originally published in Shi Kan in 1954 and reprinted in 1982.
She started to gather her pieces of work in 1919 while she was completing a bachelor's in Literature in the Arts faculty of Yenching University.
The title A Maze of Stars comes from the way Bing Xin gathered the words and sentences that sounded poetic, resonant and suggestive to her.
[2] According to Bing Xin, the title of the first book, A Maze of Stars (Fanxing in Chinese), comes from her "scattered and fragmentary thoughts"[2].
It wasn't until February 1919, when she wrote a short piece of her work called Beloved and sent it to the Chenbao Literary Supplement that she felt legitimated.
The editor eventually rearranged the lines of her poems and she admitted that she felt confident to write New Poetry after that moment.
[3] Bing Xin openly picked her influence from the New Literature and the poetry book Stray Birds written by Rabindranath Tagore.
Bing Xin wrote in her introductory essay that she started to write her thoughts at 19 years old after she had discovered Tagore's poetry book, Stray Birds, in an attempt to imitate the form of his art.
[9] In her introductory essay, Bing Xin explains that when she realized that length, conciseness and constraints such as rhythm and tonal patterns, could be erased, she started to write differently.
[1] Finally, Bing Xin's images about abstract concepts of time, love, loneliness, death and eternity are inspired by Tagore's themes.
The children, on one hand, are portrayed by the author as innocent human beings in the poem "Numberless angels/Will rise to sing the praises of a child./A child –/This fragile flesh/Enfolds a great spirit".
[25] Life and death are represented by the natural elements such as seasons in the poem: "A man breaks off a flowering branch,/And puts it in a vase –/When autumn comes and fruits ripen,/He sighs over bare twigs".
A Maze of Stars and Spring Water represent autobiographical poetry books that reflect the emotions of the writer, symbolizing spontaneity and freedom in writing.