The night gave me black eyes, but I used them to look for light. What does this mean?

The whole sentence means the denial of dark politics and the yearning and pursuit of light. Generation: refers to people who grew up in the historical stage of the Cultural Revolution. Night: alluding to the political movement of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976.

The night gave me black eyes, but I used them to look for light. "Cultural Revolution" is the background of Gu Cheng's writing this poem. Although the political movement of the Cultural Revolution has long faded away, in the minds of those who have experienced it, the Cultural Revolution is still going on now and lasted until the early 1980s.

In the vast darkness, the eyes are the only light. In people's experience, eyes are always a symbol of transparency. However, the eyes in the poem are "black eyes". This is the feeling in the poet's heart and the poet's profound reflection. This feeling is a heartbreaking pain, and it is an accumulation over time. This kind of reflection is heavy, and there is great fear behind it. And these all point to the "dark night"-the background of that era.

In such an era, such an environment, such a deep night, poets should look for light. The poet looked for light with his black eyes. This is the horn that poets use to resist the night. This level is also the theme of this poem: the poet should not only reflect on the dark past, pour out the pain in his heart, but also look for it.

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Brief introduction of the author

Gu Cheng (1956- 1993), male, originally from Shanghai, was born in a poet's home in Beijing on September 24th, 1956. He is an important representative of China's misty poetry school, and is known as a contemporary "Romantic" poet. Gu Cheng has high attainments in new poetry, old-style poetry and fable poetry. In his generation, he said, "The night gave me black eyes, but I used them to look for light." Become a classic sentence in China's new poems.

Baidu Encyclopedia-A Generation (Gu Cheng creates poems)