Title: Selected Poems of Du Fu Author: Du Fu Creation Date: c. 750-770 CE Location: China
Summary
Du Fu (712-770 CE) is universally regarded as the greatest poet in the Chinese language. His roughly 1,450 surviving poems chronicle — with unsparing honesty and extraordinary formal mastery — the catastrophic An Lushan Rebellion (755-763) and its aftermath, a convulsion associated with mass death, famine, and displacement on a scale later chroniclers and census comparisons place in the tens of millions. Du Fu's poems range from intimate domestic scenes (watching his children sleep in a hut during a rainstorm, mourning his infant son's death from starvation) to panoramic visions of armies on the march and cities in ruins. He writes of old friends glimpsed across a battlefield, of getting drunk on moonlit autumn nights, of the gap between the feasts of the powerful and the corpses by the road.
Why This Book Matters
Du Fu is often called the "Poet-Sage" (shisheng) because his work fuses the highest literary art with the deepest moral conscience. He demonstrated, once and for all, that poetry could be a vehicle for bearing witness to historical catastrophe — that private feeling and public crisis could meet in a single compressed lyric. His influence on Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese poetry is immeasurable. For over a thousand years, to write poetry in East Asia meant, in some sense, to write in the shadow of Du Fu.
Historical Context
Du Fu lived through the most dramatic turning point in Tang dynasty history. The An Lushan Rebellion of 755 shattered the cosmopolitan, confident Tang empire at its zenith, ushering in decades of warfare, famine, and displacement. Du Fu himself was captured by rebels, separated from his family, reduced to poverty, and spent his final years wandering through war-ravaged southwest China. His poetry is the supreme literary record of this calamity.
Literary Significance
Du Fu brought the "regulated verse" (lushi) form to its highest perfection — eight-line poems with strict tonal patterns and parallelism that pack extraordinary density of meaning into minimal space. He also expanded the range of acceptable poetic subjects to include the ugly, the mundane, and the politically uncomfortable. His characteristic mode — precise observation of the external world suddenly opening into overwhelming emotion — became the gold standard for Chinese lyric poetry. Critics have compared his compression and moral seriousness to Shakespeare's late work.
Research Notes
Burton Watson's selection is the best single-volume introduction. Stephen Owen's monumental "The Poetry of Du Fu" (2015, available free online through De Gruyter) provides the complete poems with facing-page translations and is an extraordinary scholarly achievement. David Hinton's translations capture the Zen-influenced naturalism. Du Fu is sometimes paired with Li Bai (the "Poet-Immortal"), but Du Fu's range and depth give him the edge for a collection focused on civilisational significance.
The Reading
Chang'an, before the fires (c. 735–755)
I was born in the first year of the Kaiyuan reign — the year by later count seven hundred and twelve — into a household of officials whose names had stood among the records of the empire for several generations. My grandfather wrote poems. My father held office. The road set down for me was the road my fathers had walked: study the classics, sit the examinations, enter the bureaucracy, serve the throne. I sat the examinations. I failed them. Not once.
So I came to the capital instead — Chang'an, the long-walled city of a million souls, the western terminus of the silk routes, the seat of the Son of Heaven who in those years was the august Xuanzong, master of the most glittering court the world had yet seen. I came with my scrolls under my arm. I lodged in shabby quarters. I sent up petitions to ministers who did not reply, and presented poems to patrons who admired the brushwork and forgot the man.
In those young years I climbed the slopes of Mount Tai and looked east across the plain, and the line came:
One day I shall climb to your very summit, and see how small all other mountains are.
Such was my confidence then. I did not yet know that the road I would in fact walk was not upward, but along the side of a country falling sideways into ruin.
I drank wine with my friend Li Bai in those years — Li Bai, who was the genius the age was prepared to recognise, who wrote as the moon writes upon water, easily, drunkenly, brilliantly, while I laboured at every couplet. We rode together one autumn through the hills east of the capital. He moved like an immortal. I admired him then and I admire him now. But my eye was not his eye. Where he saw the moon and the wine-cup, I saw also the wine-cup and the man who had carried it and the road that had brought him, and the others on that road who had no cup at all.
So even before the calamity came, the lines I set down had this in them:
Behind the red lacquered gates, wine and meat go rotten. On the road, the bones of the frozen dead.
I wrote that couplet before any of the fires. I knew already that two countries lived inside Chang'an: the country of the gilded halls, and the country of the gutter beneath them. I did not yet know how thin the wall between them was.
The rebellion (755–759)
In the eleventh month of the fourteenth year of Tianbao, An Lushan rose in the north. He was a general of Sogdian and Turkic descent who held the great frontier armies of the northeast in his single fist, and he turned that fist against the throne he had sworn to defend. His armies broke south. The eastern capital of Luoyang fell. The western capital of Chang'an fell. The aged Emperor Xuanzong rode out by the Yanqiu Gate at night and made for the road into Shu, and on that road — at Mawei post-station — his own escort guard mutinied and demanded the death of his consort, the Lady Yang Guifei, whom they blamed, with her family, for the disaster. The emperor consented. She was strangled with a silk cord beneath a pear tree. The escort then consented to march.
The rebellion would burn for eight years. When at last it was put down, the registers of the empire — when at last men could compile them again — showed losses that ran into the tens of millions of souls. There has never in any record I have read been a wound so large opened so quickly upon a people.
I was caught in it as a leaf is caught in a flood. I had sent my wife and children north for safety to the village of Fuzhou. I myself fell into the rebels' hands and was held some months within occupied Chang'an, neither a free man nor in chains, a minor official too small to be killed and too watched to escape. Through the spring of that year I walked in the city of my hope and saw it broken. Out of that walking came eight lines:
The state is shattered; mountains and rivers remain. Spring in the city — grass and trees grow thick. Touched by the times, flowers bring tears. Hating separation, birds startle the heart. Beacon fires have burned for three months now; A letter from home is worth ten thousand gold pieces. I scratch my white head, and it grows ever thinner — Soon it will be too sparse to hold a hairpin.
I called the poem "Spring View." The mountains remained, the rivers remained, even the grass came up between the paving stones as it always had. Only the empire was gone. The flowers that ought to have lifted the heart now wrung tears from it; the birdsong that ought to have eased the spirit now flinched it. My hair was already thinning from grief; soon there would not be enough of it to pin a cap to.
One night under the same moon I thought of my wife in Fuzhou, and I did not write what I felt. I wrote what she felt:
Tonight at Fuzhou the moon — my wife watches it alone in her chamber. Far away, I pity my little children, too young to understand or remember Chang'an. Her cloudy hair is fragrant in the moist mist, her jade arms cold in the clear moonlight. When shall we lean together by the empty curtain and let it shine on both our faces, tears dried?
That is the only way I knew how to bear it: to imagine her imagining me, to set our two solitudes side by side across the hundreds of li between them and let the moon, which knew neither distance nor sides, stand witness for us both. I did not know, when I wrote those lines, whether she or the children were still alive. The poem was a wish addressed into a silence that might never answer.
Qinzhou and the road west (759)
In the autumn of that year I slipped out of Chang'an and walked north, and found her, and them, and they had survived. We were together again, and we were poor as the road is poor, and we set out west, away from the war, into the high dry lands of Qinzhou where the wind smells of stone.
On the road I saw a column of conscripts being driven toward the frontier. The dust was so thick over them you could not see the bridge ahead. Mothers ran beside their sons, wives beside their husbands, children clutching the hems of fathers they would not see again, and the sound of their weeping went up to heaven.
Carts rumbling, horses neighing, conscripts with bows and arrows at their waists.
I stopped. I listened. One of the conscripts spoke to me — a man who had been called up at fifteen and was now grey at forty and had been called up again. He told me that the blood ran like water in the sea, that the emperor's hunger for new territory was a hunger that no campaign satisfied, that the fields lay untilled and the tax collectors came anyway. And then he said the thing that I cannot get out of my ear:
If you have a son, don't congratulate yourself. Better to have a daughter — a daughter can still be married to a neighbour. A son? His bones will lie in the grass, unburied.
I wrote what he said. I did not editorialise; the indictment did not need me. The voice of a man whose son's bones lay in the grass weighs more than any minister's memorial.
Chengdu — the thatched cottage (759–765)
In the winter of that year a kindly official I had known in better days, Yan Wu, sent word that I might find shelter in Chengdu, the southern city beyond the passes into Shu. We crossed the mountains. We came down into the warmer country of Sichuan. With a little help — a roll of silk here, a loan there, the labour of my own hands — I built a thatched cottage on the bank of the Flower Washing Stream, west of the city, under bamboo. For the first time in years there was a roof above our heads that was ours.
There were quieter poems in those years — the egret on the bank, the river plum opening in the second month, the children playing at chess with pins for pieces. There was even something close to peace. But the roof was made of thatch, and one autumn the gale came.
The wind tore the rushes from my roof and scattered them across the south field. The boys of the neighbourhood, who had nothing themselves, ran out and gathered the bundles and would not return them when I called; they vanished into the bamboo, and I leaned upon my staff, an old man shouting after children, and could do nothing. Then the rain came, and came all night, and dripped on the bedding of my own little ones who slept beneath leaks like a colander, and I lay awake in the cold and thought not, as you might suppose, of my own roof, but of every man on every road who had no roof at all:
How can I get a great mansion of a hundred thousand rooms to shelter all the world's poor scholars, their faces beaming, unshaken by wind and rain, steady as a mountain? Ah, if I could see such a building rise before my eyes, I would be content to have my own hut ruined, to freeze and die.
It was not heroism. It was only that I could not, lying wet under that thatch, separate my misery from theirs. The compassion that the Master teaches is not abstract. It is the wet shirt sticking to the back of one specific man imagining the wet shirt sticking to the back of another.
The Yangtze, the boat, the last years (765–770)
In the spring of the first year of Yongtai my patron Yan Wu died. The Chengdu cottage was no longer tenable. I had no other refuge. I bought passage on a riverboat and set out east down the Yangtze, and from that day to the day I close this account I did not settle again. I drifted from town to town along the great river — Zhongzhou, Yunan, Kuizhou, Jiangling, Yuezhou — sometimes a few months in one place, sometimes a few weeks, the boat my house and the gorge my window.
I was old now, and sick. My lungs were going. My left arm was half useless. My teeth had begun to leave me. And yet the lines came tighter and harder than they had ever come, as though the body's failing pressed the language into greater density.
I climbed the tower at Yueyang above Dongting Lake. The lake spread south like a second sky.
Long ago I heard tell of Dongting Lake; now at last I have climbed Yueyang Tower. East of Wu, south of Chu, earth and sky are split apart; day and night, the lake floats between heaven and earth. No word from friends or kin — old and sick, alone in a solitary boat. War horses north of the passes — the frontier is tense; leaning on the railing, tears flow down.
Earth and sky split apart by water; one sick old man leaning on a railing and weeping. Both true. Neither cancels the other. The lake is grand. The man is small. The frontier still burns. I would not pretend the lake consoled me. I would not pretend the man's grief diminished the lake.
In the autumn of the first year of Dali I lay up at Kuizhou, in the gorge country, and wrote a sequence of eight regulated poems I called "Autumn Meditations." They were the tightest verses I have ever made. Every couplet matched its opposite as a pair of mountains matches across a gorge:
Jade dew wounds and wilts the maple forest; on Wu Mountain, in Wu Gorge, the air is desolate. Waves from the river surge against the sky; wind and clouds over the pass touch the earth with darkness. Chrysanthemums, twice blooming, bring tears for days gone by; a lonely boat, once tethered, anchors a homesick heart. Everywhere, winter clothes are being hurriedly cut and sewn; in Baidi, high above, the pounding of washstones grows urgent at dusk.
Eight poems of eight lines, fifty-six characters each. Within their narrow rooms I tried to carry the autumn gorge and the lost capital, the river under my hull and the palaces I would not see again, the women on the rocks above pounding their winter cloth and the soldiers far north watching the frontier passes for horsemen. Every image was the thing it was, and was also something else. The dew was dew, and was also a grief; the boat was a boat, and was also my own homesickness lying at anchor.
In the spring of the third year of Dali I went south again, looking for I do not know what — old friends, a posting, a place to stop. I did not find it. I died on my boat upon the Xiang River, somewhere between Tanzhou and Yuezhou, in the autumn of the fifth year of Dali. I was fifty-eight. The illness in my lungs and the long hunger took me at the same time, as such things take a man.
The empire I had served did not recover. The Tang would last another century and a half in name, but the cosmopolitan confidence of the Kaiyuan years — the open road to Sogdiana, the trust between throne and frontier — was gone, and never returned. I had lived across the break. The fifteen hundred or so poems I left behind became, in the centuries after, what later readers called a poet-history: not because I had set out to write the history, but because I had refused to look away from any part of what was in front of me while I wrote.
The old formula says: poetry is meant to express one's ambition. My ambition, in the end, was not for office. It was to hold, in a verse of eight lines, the world I had been given — the gull on the river, the snow on the southern mountain, the cup of wine and the bones in the grass, the moon on my wife's sleeve and the moon on the conscript's helmet — and to hold them honestly, without letting the beauty hide the cruelty or letting the cruelty unmake the beauty. Whether I held them well is for the ear that comes after to decide. I have leaned on the railing. The tears have flowed down. The boat moves on.
This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →
Burton Watson's Selected Poems of Du Fu (Columbia University Press, 2002) is the essential single-volume introduction in English — 127 poems selected by the most accomplished translator of classical Chinese poetry of his generation, spanning Du Fu's entire career from youthful ambition through the great catastrophe to the wandering final years.
By Burton Watson. The definitive English-language selection: 127 poems spanning Du Fu's entire career.
By Burton Watson. The paperback edition — the most accessible and affordable entry point to the Poet-Sage.
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