Images, overlaid
Du Fu pushes parallelism to the extreme
Six Short Poems (1) Du Fu The sun rises The clouds rise to the east in the north of the fence from my house in the lake right out of the mud And the beaches The bamboo grows tall are remote and there dance and there sings a jade-green kingfisher and the kun cranes 杜甫 绝句六首·其一 日出篱东水，云生舍北泥。 竹高鸣翡翠，沙僻舞鹍鸡。
In these six poems, Du Fu plays with parallelism. Every character in each line matches the corresponding character in the next, forming five pairs:
sun rise fence east lake/cloud emerge house north mud
In this poem, Du never breaks the parallelism, never provides the counterpoint that we might expect. The effect is a kind of mirage-like, scintillating confusion, with images that should be separate overlaid on one another. The sun and the clouds are both rising together, the lake and the mud seem to blend.
We don't know what kind of a bird a kun is, but according to all ancient sources it was "like a crane."
I disagree that Du Fu was “playing with parallelism” here. Parallel structures were omnipresent in 五言絕句 and other forms of regulated verse. Later, more strict interpretations of this poetic form, considered it mandatory.
Contemporaries would therefore most likely have regarded a break in the parallelism as a mistake unless there was a good poetic reason to do so. Du Fu was not in any way “playing with parallelism.”
Another fine effort.