reCent-style Shi Poetry: HePtasyllabiC regulateD verse 185This approach allows us to make general sense of the poem but is far from
resolving the ambiguities of its tone. As a submerged counterpoint to that self-
deprecatory admission of failure, we can hear another set of possibilities: “I live
for, and in, poetry. My faculty of poetic creation is as natural and powerful as
the waters of a river. Whether or not my poem describes the flooding river waters,
each remains the other’s perfect analogue. To find my true peers, one would have
to look to the great poets of past centuries.” These tonal ambiguities are at their
height in the poem’s middle, parallel couplets. The third couplet’s account of the
poet’s “equipment” for enjoying the river scenery (his pier and his raft) emphasizes
its slapdash, make-do aspect. Yet might it be that just such improvised, home-
made work best suits the river; that the pavilions and excursion boats of more
high-toned outings are, in comparison, artificial and inauthentic? In the second
couplet, the poet’s wry self-mockery is again, paradoxically, voiced in language of
startling technical brilliance. The opposition of lao qu versus chun lai is another
instance of borrowed parallelism: while laoqu and chunlai work perfectly as par-
allels in the noun–verb senses “old age–go/springtime–come,” in Du Fu’s poem
only the second pair, chun lai, can actually be construed as noun–verb; the first
line of the couplet requires that we take lao verbally as “grow old” and qu as a ver-
bal complement, “-away.” While parallel couplets generally tend to create a sense
of stasis and balance, this stroke of verbal invention gives this couplet a dynamic
asymmetry and an effect of informal spontaneity. In fact, the poem as a whole is
remarkable for the way in which, even while rigorously observing the symmetries
and formal constraints of the regulated verse form, it conveys the immediacy of
rambling speech.
The word man (in line 3) is a key term here. In its basic sense, it refers to the
“overflow” of a liquid. In its derivative adverbial uses, it describes things that
happen in a manner that is out of control, excessive, sloppy, impulsive, or not
thought out. Thus Du Fu jokingly reassures the flowers and birds (which might
have their secret essence revealed, or be definitively “captured,” by a more im-
pressive poetic talent) that they need not worry—this particular old man has no
pretensions to being a great poet, so they can rest easy. Yet even as we register this
surface meaning, it is impossible not to hear an alternative suggestion: this effort-
less and slapdash manner is a sign not of a lack of power but of a fully achieved
power; the flowers and birds have no more need to fear this power than they fear
any other power of nature. The man (slapdash) manner of his poetry is a counter-
part to the “overflowing” power of the river’s surging waters. Characteristically,
Du Fu’s deepest reflections on poetry here are inseparable from the ironies of his
self-depiction.
The set of eight heptasyllabic regulated verses entitled “Qiu xing” (Autumn
Meditations) represents a point of culmination, for both the qilü form and these
tensions within Du Fu’s poetry between the image of the powerful creator and that
of the quirky and ineffectual old man. Written in 766, within four years of the end
of his life, they show us the poet as he realizes that his dreams of making a mark