Spring View

Lines 1–2

國 is the state, and in 757 it is also the capital region Du Fu is standing in. 破 is “broken,” fallen. Mountains and rivers 在, remain. The second line lets spring happen anyway. 深 is depth and thickness: plants have taken the city. The couplet does not say who won. It says what is left.

Lines 3–4

This is the first parallel couplet. Feeling the times pairs with grieving the parting. Flowers pair with birds. Splashing tears pairs with a startled heart. The grammar can be read two ways, and both are old: the flowers shed tears, or the poet, moved by the times, sees flowers and his tears splash. The parallelism keeps the feeling and the season in the same frame. The translation chooses one reading and says so by its shape. The gloss leaves the words in order so the other reading stays available.

恨 here is closer to grief and resentment at a separation than to hatred of a person. 別 is the parting from his family.

Lines 5–6

The second parallel couplet. Beacon fires against a family letter. Three months against ten thousand gold. 連三月 can be heard as “for three months running” or as the stretch from the first month into the third. Either way the war has taken the spring. 抵 is “to be worth, to balance.” A letter that cannot arrive is priced like a fortune. 金 is gold, or cash; the hyperbole is the point.

Lines 7–8

白頭 is his own white hair. Scratching it, he finds it even shorter, too thin to hold a hairpin. 勝 is “to be able to bear,” the retained literary Mandarin reading shēng. Modern shèng is also used for this sense; the word does not have to mean “victory.” 簪 is the pin that would keep a cap in place. The last line is physical. The war has come down to a hand in thinning hair.

This is a five-character lüshi, regulated verse: eight lines, rhyme on the even lines, parallelism in the middle two couplets.

The rhyme words 深, 心, 金, and 簪 are level-tone words in the 侵 group. Line 1 ends on 在 and does not rhyme. That is the ordinary “first line does not enter the rhyme” pattern.

Level and oblique here are rhyme-book categories. 國, 木, 別, 月, 白, 欲, and 不 are entering tones, so they are oblique even when modern Mandarin gives them a pitch that sounds level. 白 is bái, a rising tone now, and oblique in the table. The pinyin is for reading aloud. The table is for the form.

Read the table alongside the paired phrases. In lines 5–6, 烽火 answers 家書, and 三月 answers 萬金. The fifth line is 平仄平平仄; its fourth character, 三, does not establish a break in the regulated pattern. Modern tone marks alone cannot be used to diagnose an irregular line.

For 勝 in 不勝簪, we retain the literary reading shēng, “to bear.” Modern Mandarin also commonly uses shèng for this meaning; that reading does not force the sense “victory.” The printed pinyin is a reading convention, not a reconstruction of Tang pronunciation. Historical level and oblique classes remain a separate question.

In spring 757 Du Fu was in Chang’an. An Lushan’s forces held the city. The Tang court was not there. Du Fu’s family was in Fuzhou in Shaanxi, 鄜州, a different place from the coastal city that shares the English spelling Fuzhou. He would reach the court in exile at Fengxiang later that year. This poem is from the months before that, inside the occupied capital.

The beacons and the missing letter are the history inside the form. The poem does not need a modern parallel to be about a state that has failed and a spring that arrives regardless. Read the parallelism with the lüshi page, and the separation with the homesickness shelf. Quiet Night Thought is the small poem of being away. This one is the capital. Both are Tang.