Humour, realism, reverie
Du Fu fails to keep a lid on his humanity
The Wind Destroys my Cottage Roof Du Fu September skies stand high, but mad winds roar. They strip my hut of half its thatching straw, Which vaults the stream and spreads along the shore. The treetop branches snag the tufts that soar, The low tufts spiral to the river floor. The village kids from Southside know I’m past my best. Those miscreants didn’t even hide their theft, They grabbed my straw and fled through bamboo groves. I cursed till dry lips cracked, but none was left, So with my cane I puffed back home bereft. Much later, stillness. Clouds took on the tint Of ink. The autumn sky turned indistinct. Long years have left this blanket cold like steel. My son’s foot ripped it in his restless dreams. From bed to skylight, not one spot is dry, The raindrops form unbroken thready streams. Since An’s rebellion, I've had little sleep, Now, drenched, how far away the morning seems. I want a million rooms in one great hall, A joyful home for gentlemen, however poor, A sturdy shelter when the hard rains fall. Just imagine! If I could glimpse that hall just once and see its towers ascend, To freeze to death in a broken hut would be a happy end. 杜甫 茅屋为秋风所破歌 八月秋高风怒号，卷我屋上三重茅。 茅飞渡江洒江郊，高者挂罥长林梢，下者飘转沉塘坳。 南村群童欺我老无力，忍能对面为盗贼。 公然抱茅入竹去，唇焦口燥呼不得，归来倚杖自叹息。 俄顷风定云墨色，秋天漠漠向昏黑。 布衾多年冷似铁，娇儿恶卧踏里裂。 床头屋漏无干处，雨脚如麻未断绝。 自经丧乱少睡眠，长夜沾湿何由彻！ 安得广厦千万间，大庇天下寒士俱欢颜，风雨不动安如山。 呜呼！何时眼前突兀见此屋，吾庐独破受冻死亦足！
This poem makes no sense. I hope for you it’s as transformative as it was for me. It was like looking at Jonathan Swift for the first time and realising that people in the past were just as weird as they are now.
This starts as a sonic experiment: the first five lines rhyme, with a rhyme that is today read as “ow,” and probably sounded fairly similar 1,300 years ago. It’s the howling of the wind. The poem then turns to self-mockery, then to grim realism, then to fantastical reverie, without ever pausing, or signalling what the poet wants to do. This feels like a poet who’s given up on convention and rules. He’s just communicating, desperately, because that’s his function in life.
Thanks for the comments above. I'll explain a little more what I mean by saying, "This poem makes no sense."
Poems are usually quite short pieces of writing, and poets often use a single poem to express a single thing - a single emotion, or an image, or an idea, or a story, or... Whatever it is, there is usually a unity to a poem. The last line is, in some way, "about" the same thing as the first line.
This poem doesn't really follow that rule. It contains four separate sections with quite different tones and different poetic or aesthetic goals.
The first part is an innovation in sound: Du uses a very unusual rhyming pattern, with all of the first five lines having the same end rhyme. It's a description of a scene, with personification of the wind, and the rhyming "ow" sounds creating a lovely sense of its unending howl. This would be an interesting poem and impressive innovation just on its own - and many Tang poems were even shorter than this section, so Du Fu absolutely could have stopped writing there.
But he didn't, and his second section is narrative and humorous. Du allows a sudden shift of scene (he skips forward in time to the end of the storm), introduces characters, and changes tone entirely. Again, this section is strong enough to stand alone, and as a reader, we are left with the puzzle that faces every poetry reader: why did the author put these things together? What is the message?
I think, rather uniquely, the only message here is Du himself. He is expressing his own aesthetic view of the world by describing each of its features through his own eyes, literally pouring his inner self onto the page.
This is reinforced by the third and fourth parts, which bring in his love for his family, and fantasies about fixing the world. The big gaps in tone among all of these sections force us to recognise that the only through-line is Du.
Charles brought up the response of Chinese commentators, and they have always been keenly aware of this feature of Du Fu's poetry. In fact, a special term was invented to describe poems that shift in tone in this way: 沉郁顿挫. This phrase was taken from one of Du's poems and is applied almost exclusively to Du. In the book Charles recommended, it is used nine times to describe Du Fu's poems, and only three times to describe other writers. The Baidu-Pedia page for this poem (https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E8%8C%85%E5%B1%8B%E4%B8%BA%E7%A7%8B%E9%A3%8E%E6%89%80%E7%A0%B4%E6%AD%8C/2813957) also describes it as 沉郁顿挫.
So that's what I meant by saying the poem doesn't make sense: it doesn't follow the "rules," or rather, the same patterns, as most other poems. And that's what makes it unique and brilliant.
This is a famous poem, and I’ve never seen a Chinese commentator who thought it made no sense. For a very thorough analysis see: 《唐诗鉴赏辞典》.