reCent-style Shi Poetry: HePtasyllabiC regulateD verse 183beauties of the season and wry commentary on the poet’s own state of unkempt
dissipation.
Lines 3 and 4 juxtapose a deflating avowal of the poet’s condition (debt) and its
cause (drinking) with a sort of banqueter’s philosophizing on life’s impermanence.
The interest of the couplet stems in part from the way in which its informal tone
belies its virtuosity. The parallel relations established between the two lines—such
as that between wine debts and human life (both noun phrases, formed of attribu-
tive plus class noun), which seems to posit the open bar tab as a universal condi-
tion of existence—display a whimsical brilliance. The parallel between xun chang
(ordinary, -ily) and qi shi (seventy), furthermore, depends on a sort of pun on the
alternative sense of xun and chang as measures of length; it is as quantities that
they form a suitable parallel for the number seventy. This device of treating terms
as parallel via wordplay on secondary meanings is a bravura technical effect that
later critics called borrowed parallelism (jiedui).
The third couplet, though, is clearly the poem’s center of gravity. Here we see
both vividly detailed observation and a masterful display of technique—note,
for example, the way our sense in these lines of sudden, fleeting revelation is re-
inforced by the striking syntactic device of delaying the verb to the very last posi-
tion in the line. In fact, for some later critics, the delicate artfulness of this couplet
seemed almost symptomatic of the sort of display of small-scale craft for which
they would criticize Late Tang and Song poetry.3
As we see in the following poem, this seeming tension between technique and
naturalness is a persistent concern, for both Du Fu and his readers:
Tonal Pattern of “The Qu River”
─
cháo
─
huí│
nyit│
nyit│
diăn─
chūn─ △
yī│
meĭ
│
nyit─
jiāng─
tóu│
jìn│
zuì─ △
guī│
jiŭ
│
zhài─
xún─
cháng─
xíng│
chù│
yŏu─
rén
─
shēng│
tshit│
dzyip│
gŭ─
lái─ △
xī─
chuān
─
huā│
gep│
dep─
shēn─
shēn│
xiàn│
diăn
│
shuĭ─
qīng─
tíng│
kuăn│
kuăn─ △
fēi─ X
chuán
│
yŭ─
fēng─
guāng│ X
gòng─ X
liú│
zhuăn│ X
zàn
─
shí─ X
xiāng│
shăng│
mak─
xiāng─ △
wéi