reCent-style Shi Poetry: HePtasyllabiC regulateD verse 187and the flight of Xuanzong (r. 712–756) in 756. Moreover, particularly in the final
poems of “Autumn Meditations,” this retrospective extends still further to include
the far remoter Han dynasty past. The poem immediately preceding this one in
the cycle is largely a meditation on fragmentary remnants of Han grandeur, and
we are meant to register that the very names “Kunwu park” and “Yusu lodge” are
themselves relics of the grand Shanglin Park, developed under the auspices of Em-
peror Wu of the Han (Yusu means “imperial lodging place,” so-called because Em-
peror Wu stayed there on his excursions) and immortalized by the fu (rhapsody)
writers of that age.4 All these frames of reference are telescoped together, creating
extreme compression, multiplicity, and fragmentation of meaning.
The most striking case of such compression in this poem occurs in the sec-
ond couplet. Here parallelism becomes a formal container that suggests a com-
pleteness and stability that the words themselves never quite yield. As we move
through each line, we are repeatedly thrown back and forced to start over in our
effort to resolve the syntax. Nouns are followed by verbs but cannot be the subjects
of those verbs—rice does not “peck,” and wutong trees do not “perch”—and these
verbs are immediately further skewed by the addition of the odd verbal comple-
ments “leftover” and “old,” and so on through the line. Parallelism by its nature
allows for more syntactic flexibility than would be possible in linear composition,
as the stability of the “vertical” relations between lines within the couplet allows
the “horizontal” relations of line syntax to be correspondingly relaxed. But the
degree of syntactic disruption in this couplet remains extraordinary. We might
compare the much milder effect of the third couplet in “The Qu River”: “A flower-
weaving butterfly, deep within, appears; / a water-dabbling dragonfly, slow and
placid, flies.” As we saw, these lines involve a kind of “loading” in which the some-
what complex relations of attributive clause, noun, and adverb await a release that
is delayed to the very end of the line. The far denser syntactic loading in the “Au-
tumn Meditations” couplet, by contrast, leads not to a clear moment of resolution,
but to an indefinite suspension. We finally have to construe the syntax of the third
through sixth syllables of these lines as attributive clauses with inverted subjects,
together modifying the final-position nouns “grain” and “branch.” But the exact
relation between these nouns and the “fragrant rice” and “emerald wutong tree”
that open the lines could be predication, apposition, or contrast or a range of other
possibilities. All that seems certain of the relation is that a grain is a fragment of
rice, and a branch is a fragment of a tree. Thus all our efforts to resolve the line’s
fragmented syntax leave us with fragments. In this cycle, Du Fu meditates on the
material and literary remnants of personal and cultural history, saddened by the
failure of those fragments to cohere, to recapture a lost wholeness. In couplets
like this, we see the poet creating a verbal texture that mirrors that struggle in the
mind.
The poem’s close alludes to a story told of the Southern Dynasties poet Jiang
Yan (444–505): Jiang Yan meets the Jin dynasty writer Guo Pu (276–324) in a
dream; Guo Pu asks him to return the multicolored writing brush that Guo Pu
had lent him long before. On waking, Jiang Yan finds that his literary talent has