If you don't get the allusion...
That's because it's just to the bloke who lives next door
Four Short Poems (About my New Cottage) Du Fu No. (1) (delight) The bamboo grows so thick on the evening side of the house That the door won't open And the pepper trees on the north side Line up with their backs to the town When those plums are ripe, I'll eat them with Old Zhu and debate with my neighbour Ruan when these pines grow tall 杜甫 绝句四首·其一 堂西长笋别开门，堑北行椒却背村。 梅熟许同朱老吃，松高拟对阮生论。
This innovative short series by Du Fu contains what is to my mind one of the most dizzying and transcendent poems in existence (No. 3). The other poems seem slighter, but interesting nonetheless. I’ve reordered them and added new titles in parentheses in an attempt to make emotional sense of how these poems might fit together.
In this entry, we see Du Fu very deliberately giving up on elaborate and allusive writing. He mentions a Ruan in the last line, and our thoughts turn immediately to Ruan Ji, a famous bad-boy poet-soldier from some 400 years before, referenced frequently by Du Fu (probably at least 20 references over the years). And the Zhu could be any number of people… but no. Du Fu attached his own footnote to this poem saying, “Ruan and Zhu are local acquaintances.” Instead of making connections to the great and the good, the historic and the worthy, Du is just talking about the ordinary people around him. There are plenty of historic and literary references that he could draw on to illustrate his new back-to-nature lifestyle. But he doesn’t. He simply describes it in loving, lush detail.
I like how Du Fu was simply referring to a ordinary people around him being Ruan and Zhu. Here we are hundreds and hundreds of years later discussing a playful use of words by the poet. Somewhere in teh aether or heavens or who-knows-where, , Du Fu is no doubt smiling at that.