Little Primer of Du Fu, Poems 1-5

[x_los]

This week we start David Hawkes' Little Primer of Du Fu. I'll replicate the poems themselves here, but this book contains considerable exegesis, so I do advise you to grab this copy.

Because this exegesis is relatively substantial, let's start by reading poems 1 through 5, inclusive. There are 35 poems in the collection, so this should take us about seven weeks (unless we scale either up or down, after speaking about it).

I'm gathering additional research materials, but for this first week I'd like us to concentrate on Hawkes' introduction and the first of these poems. 

Comments

Re: 4. 月夜 Yuè-yè

[x_los]

Actually I did know this backstory from the CHP and CLP. Though I’ve never heard of crabs in relation to the Mid-Autumn Festival, huh.

“The rules that we do need to remember when reading poems in Regulated Verse are (1) that the poem must be one of eight lines in four couplets; and (2) that the two middle couplets (lines 3–4 and lines 5–6) must each be antithetically arranged: i.e. line 4 must parallel line 3 in both grammar and meaning, and line 6 must parallel line 5 in the same way.”: Lol but that is nice to know

Without that explication I was not gonna understand those tears as happy

Re: 4. 月夜 Yuè-yè

[superborb]

I think it's just that crabs are in season around then?

I still don't understand why the tears are happy