The Cold Food Day
- Poetry of Shen Quanqi

This poem was written during Shen Quanqi's period of exile. The Cold Food Festival, occurring two days before the Qingming Festival, was a traditional occasion when people extinguished fires and ate cold food to commemorate Jie Zitui. It was also a time for family reunions, tomb sweeping, and remembrance. For an exiled poet, this festival instead evoked intense loneliness and homesickness. With extremely concise strokes, Shen Quanqi contrasts the external solitude of "extinguished flames" and "hidden smoke" with the internal fervor of a "burning heart," achieving a psychological shift from stillness to movement, from external to internal, in just four lines.