How to Read Chinese Poetry A Guided Anthology

r e C e n t-s t y l e Sh i P oe t ry : quat ra i n s 217

hear say kill person Han river on 聞道殺人漢水上 (wén dào shā rén hàn shuĭ shàng)
wives girls many at official army within 婦女多在官軍中 (fù nǚ duō zài guān jūn zhōng)
[Tonal pattern Ia (imperfect), see p. 171]

In about 759, an ailing Du Fu moved his family to Shu (Sichuan); he remained in
the south for the rest of his life. In the spring of 765, Shu was thrown into chaos by
the fighting of military factions. In the autumn of the same year, the Gansu Cor-
ridor in the northwest was repeatedly wracked by invasions of Tangut, Tuyuhun,
Tibetan, and Uighur forces, some of whom reached as far as the area of the Chi-
nese capital. Countless refugees fled south to safety. However, at the Han River, an
army of the Imperial Guard set upon them, extorting money, raping, and killing.
Du Fu wrote this poem to express his outrage. He is deliberately unpoetic here (if
we consider frontier poetry like that by Wang Changling to be the norm for mili-
tary topics); his point is to shock and shame his countrymen.
A greater influence on qijue development came from the regulated verse of Du
Fu’s late period, particularly his qilü (chap. 9). To express the complexities of a life-
time of hard experience, Du Fu abandoned the unity of scene that characterizes
most High Tang poetry and, through the use of dense symbolism and rich cultural
allusions, created sudden shifts of point of view that obliterate barriers of time
and space, and distinctions between self and world. Late Tang qijue often present
a shortened version of Du Fu’s “shifting style”: the first couplet describes an ex-
perience in the present that serves as a catalyst for mental projection in the second
couplet. Thus later qijue poets often juxtaposed different realms of existence: past
glory with present ruin, consciousness of age with memory of youth, mundane
reality with supramundane legend or imagination.
A fine example is “Red Cliff,” by Du Mu (803–852). Du Mu had a moderately
successful bureaucratic career in the polarized political climate of the period, but
the image presented in his qijue (and affirmed in popular anecdotes about him) is
that of a playboy. Even a weighty historical subject like that of “Red Cliff ” becomes,
in Du Mu’s hands, a romantic daydream:

C 1 0. 1 5

Red Cliff

Buried in sand a broken spear, its iron not yet gone

I take up and burnish it, and recall an ancient age

If east wind had not aided young Master Zhou

Still: spring would bind the Qiao girls deep in Bronze Bird Tower

[QTS 16:523.5980; QSTRJJ, 676–678]

赤壁 (chì bì)

broken spear bury sand iron not destroy 折戟沉沙鐵未銷 (zhé jĭ chén shā tiĕ wèi xiāo)
self take rub wash recognize former dynasty 自將磨洗認前朝 (zì jiāng mó xĭ rèn qián cháo)