When is a poem not a poem?
When it's a collection of words yoked together by formal rules alone
Six Short Poems (4) Du Fu A sudden rain The slanting sun sprinkles turns about the feet the waist of the creek of the tree The yellow birds The white fish stand in pairs leap on each side of and turn over a new leaf and a nest 杜甫 绝句六首·其四 急雨捎溪足,斜晖转树腰。 隔巢黄鸟并,翻藻白鱼跳。
The feet of the creek are its lower reaches.
Here, I think Du Fu is pushing his parallelism to the extreme. He has abandoned visual rhymes in favour of something that approaches a pun. Slanting sun and sudden rain don’t have anything to do with each other; they just fit the formal parallel pattern. Similarly the feet of a river and the waist of a tree don’t share anything except this shared metaphor of human body parts applied to something in nature. The actions of standing in pairs and leaping are utterly disparate, and in fact the verb 并, for being in a pair, is used in an unusual way. It’s like Du Fu is showing off how he can shoehorn different things together simply through the form of his poem.
I love this poem and possibly for all the wrong reasons. It feels like two poems twisting in and out of one another as the flow of a creek and the branches and roots of a tree. Thank you for introducing Du Fu to me.
Are you deliberately merging the parallelism at the end there? Should the last two lines be read as part of both parallel sentences? Maybe put them on one line if so to indicate that more clearly.