Little Primer of Du Fu, Poems 21-25

[x_los]

This is week 5/7 on 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.

 

This week we're reading poems 21 through 25, inclusive.

 

How to Read Chinese Poetry has two chapters on forms Du Fu uses extensively:

 

Ch 8, Recent Style Shi Poetry, Pentasyllabic Regulated Verse (Wuyan Lüshi) 

Ch 9, Recent Style Shi Poetry, Heptasyllabic Regulated Verse (Qiyan Lüshi) 

 

Three other chapters on other verse forms Du Fu sometimes employs, or which people quoting Du Fu employ, also mention him:

 

Ch 10,  Recent Style Shi Poetry, Quatrains (Jueju): some mention of Du Fu’s “Three Quatrains, No. 3”

Ch 14, Ci Poetry,  Long Song Lyrics on Objects (Yongwu Ci): some mention of Du Fu's “Beautiful Lady” (Jiaren)

Ch 18, A Synthesis:  Rhythm, Syntax, and Vision of Chinese Poetry: some mention of Du Fu’s poem “The Jiang and Han Rivers” 

 

Additional Reading for this Week: Chapter 10

Comments

Ch 10, Recent Style Shi Poetry, Quatrains (Jueju): some mention of Du Fu’s “Three Quatrains, N

[x_los]

Weird that they didn’t put the 4 line jueju first followed by the 8 line lushi when most people treat a lushi like just a double jueju I think

This chapter is shit at clearly presenting what a wujue is vs the other category in a memorable way

Deixis
Modality

‘Fixed length’ this bit claiming this is new is a bit wacky because the physical process of setting anything to music is fairly determinative 

There have to be so many shitty chess is life poems in Chinese because they’re both (well, Breath, but) some variant of Qi 

I don’t quite see the pear blossoms rendered as snow aren’t they more likely the line’s fragrant spring?

juyan: verse eyes

bottom 205,Wang Wie, cold plum

‘‘Li Bai (701–762)—brilliant, insouciant, frequently inebriated, and mostly unemployed’ aren’t we all, buddy

‘By far, Li Bai’s favorite topic was Li Bai.’ He’s dead you can stop roasting

‘Li Bai presents himself as a figure of fun—the drunken poet covered in flowers and following the moon’s reflection in the stream. The vignette is utterly charm- ing. Yet poems like this should make us ask ourselves: Is the Li Bai who appears in his poems the real Li Bai or a fictional construct? This is an important issue in the Chinese context, as the root of the poetic impulse is said to be shi yan zhi (poetry expresses intent), which would suggest that poems are always spontaneous, true reflections of the writer’s inner being.’ Both an interesting use of charm and an intriguing explication of hawkes’ tendency to read composition ‘inspirations’ very literally

Again with the nomad flute

Use 10:16 for BingGe*

What's an entering tone??

Closure

Turn/zhuan

I'm not really getting a ton out of this chapter, the poem types are unclear to me (tho admittedly I've read in bits)
Hope he sums up

Jin Changxu's Spring lament comes back to the yellow birds as the symbol of the deaths of young men in combat*

Readers trained to expect closure