168 t He tang Dy na s t y
thousand gold taels” in the next line. It seems to denote the first three months of
757, when the rebels and government troops fought pitched battles. It may also al-
lude to a historical event that occurred in 206 b.C.e.—the three successive months
of the burning of the Qin capital (located in essentially the same place as the Tang
capital) after the rebel forces of Xiang Yu (232–202 b.C.e.) had overrun and torched
it. Then, “third month” refers to March 757, when Du Fu composed this poem.
The verb lian (span) leads to the suggestion that Du Fu might have been thinking
of the yearlong warfare spanning the two “third months” (March 756 and March
757). “Ten thousand gold taels” is far less ambiguous. It is meant to signify the
high value ascribed by Du Fu to a family letter due to the extraordinary length of
separation. It also reveals the extreme difficulty of communication because of the
partition of the land by the warring parties. Finally, we should take note of a touch
of irony in this third couplet: it is two linking verbs that set forth all the temporal
and spatial realities of separation.white head scratch◦ even shorter 白頭搔更短 (bái tóu sāo gèng duăn)
simply be about to not◦ able (to hold) hairpin 渾欲不勝簪 (hùn yù bú shèng zān)The final couplet unfailingly performs its expected twin functions of he: to move
toward a closure and to make a well-rounded whole (yuanhe) by joining beginning
and end. If, in the third couplet, we see a shift from the country to the family, here
we observe a further shift from the family to the poet himself—the quickened
process of his aging. A return to the poet’s experiential world in the final couplet
is a conventional move in a lüshi poem. As noted earlier, the two middle couplets
are strictly parallel and usually stripped of references to a specific time or place,
thus projecting a timeless world in the imagination of the poet. By contrast, the
final couplet is by convention nonparallel and, as such, particularly conducive to a
realistic portrayal of the poet’s present condition. Consider how the dispensing of
parallel syntax enables the poet to depict his own condition with a long, uninter-
rupted sentence: “My white hairs, as I scratch them, grow more sparse, / Simply
becoming unable to hold hairpins.”
Unlike in the first three couplets, there is a single subject, the white-haired
head, and all the remaining words are devoted to describing it. In presenting such
a close-up portrayal of his white-haired head, the poet intends to tell us not so
much his physical condition as his innermost suffering. Although it may seem
to be an understatement of the poet’s intense emotion, this close-up is actually a
very powerful expression of it. When a poet’s sorrow reaches the point of rapidly
ruining his health, what better way can he find to indicate the depth of his suffer-
ing than by depicting the destruction of his body? While rendering pointless any
abstract emotive words, this evocative image of the poet’s white-haired, balding
head inevitably harks back to the broken country in the first line and thus produces
the dual effect of “moving in a cycle, going and returning” (xunhuan wang fu). As
the sensitive reader goes through again the images of the broken country, the scat-
tered family, grieving nature, and the aging poet, he perceives a grand Confucian