Why does du fu feel shame

His mother is believed to have been of Turkic origin. His father made his fortune from caravans selling fabrics, paper, and wine.

Li Bai was five when the family relocated—or fled—to Sichuan province in southwestern China. From the start, Li Bai showed an energetic mind, and his father hoped he would enter the civil service.

At seventeen Li Bai set out to make his mark. Heaven begot a talent like me and must put me to good use And a thousand cash in gold, squandered, will come again …Since ancient times saints and sages have been obscure, But only drinkers have left behind their names.

Li Bai crisscrossed the country singing his songs and writing them on walls. It was said that he could drink anyone under the table. His closest friends—barmen, recluses, farmers, aspiring officials—lent him money, gave him shelter, or shared their home brew. Never had they met such a loquacious man.

A genius, they thought, but a loose cannon. He soon began to grasp his predicament: poets were welcome at parties and rewarded with gold and even a good horse, but they were little more than entertainment.

The emperor was taxing the populace to bankruptcy and launching vanity wars. His writings for his wife reveal a different ache; having failed to secure a position, he was ashamed to go home.

She died shortly after the birth of their second child, and he married a second time for the sole purpose of finding a mother for his children. My friend is sailing west, away from Yellow Crane Tower. Through the March blossoms he is going down to Yangzhou. His sail casts a single shadow in the distance, then disappears, Nothing but the Yangtze flowing on the edge of the sky.

In , at the age of forty-one, humiliated by his repeated failure to secure a position, Li Bai was presented one day with a large red envelope. Emperor Xuanzong was personally summoning him to the capital. He found in ancient poems, the Songs of Chu anthology, folk songs, and the learned poems known as gufeng —written a thousand years earlier and prized for their incantatory power, exuberance, and raw immediacy—an artistic lineage.

His contemporaries described him reciting verses spontaneously, as if on currents of energy or madness and as intricately as a master swordsman. Every word, every line, and every rhyme were in place—the poem was perfectly wrought at the very first attempt. Li Bai gave full-throated voice to the lives of others: boat pullers, innkeepers, courtesans, weaving women, conscripts, drinkers. The emissary will start out tomorrow morning, So we are busy tonight sewing robes for our men.

Daoist cosmology is structured on contact between all forms, appearing and dissolving, in a continuous and self-generating fabric. Therefore, any individual has the capacity to transform the order of things, but all individuals are grist for the endless transformations of the world. Such poetry has an analogy in classical Chinese painting: the artist masters a series of elements from nature rocks, birds, mountains, boats, grasses, etc.

Art begins when the painter organizes the elements into a composition of his own and conveys them on paper in a fluid and uninterrupted session. The painting will not be revised; this art cannot be redone. The painting is a temporal gesture, an action that is born, lives, and dies.

The artist must resolve or distill contradictions in the moment of composition. The highly prized quality of presence—execution, timing, skill, artistry—is revealed in the act itself. Once a celebrity, Li Bai died a pauper in Some 1, of his poems have survived. He felt hemmed in by its rules, which seemed to reward technical conformity over expression and spirit. Du Fu, who had met Li Bai just a few months earlier, stayed with him through his recovery. Du Fu was born into an intellectually elite family, and he seemed destined for greatness.

But he failed the civil service examination at least twice. Chroniclers, puzzled for a thousand years by such stumbles, have suspected that others sabotaged him. Perhaps Du Fu was too honest, too critical in his analysis of contemporary problems; no one knows. Do you really think it is funny? It is heartbreaking!!! How many days off? Have you ever counted? The poor students and their tuition fees are only in school but a few days and are being taught to be so ignorant!!!

The famous people of ancient times are abused by these ignorant people. Oh poor ignorant teachers and students, you should do some soul-searching! Tarnishing 5 thousand years of Chinese culture.

Afterward people parody you like this. How will your descendants feel. Or it could be that I can relate to the Time of Troubles, since many of my family have perished in civil strife, concentration camps and war.

Still, his poems are full of emotion, virtue, sincerity and realism. It is the latter that I will try to emphasize my paper on. Reality of the modern day USA is not the reality of the majority of the world, although it can be hard to remember that.

The suffering of this world has not diminished greatly since 8th century, and on the other side, the pleasures remain the same. The reality of Tu Fu is our reality too. While this short discourse probably won't be up to par with works of contemporary and ancient scholars that have spent centuries analyzing Tu Fu, I still hold a droplet of hope that you will find the following text acceptable.

Ch'iang Village Tu Fu The chickens are letting out wild squawks And while they still squabble the guests arrive - We chase them into the trees As a knock comes on the brushwood door: It is four or five old men, come to ask after my long travels. Each has brought something with him, And out of their kettles come clear and dark wines. They say, "Please don't mind that the wine is thin, We have no one to plow the millet fields, The wars have not yet stopped, And the young are all fighting to the east.

The song done, I look to heaven and sigh, And on a Or could it be the same kind of shame and guilt a survivor of a car crash feels before the parents of his friend, who perished in that same wreck? Whatever the answer is, they all feel for each other and "tears flow freely".

Ch'iang Village brings forward compassion for others and it has a really humane, warm touch. What starts out with ignorant chickens ends with tears. The emotions the elders feel get transposed onto Tu Fu himself. He is no stranger to adversity; he too was separated from his family. And yet instead of showing his strength to them, he cries with them.

This is the kind of realism that grabs you and won't let go and this is the reason that 13 centuries later we can still relate to Tu Fu's poetry. Get Access. Satisfactory Essays. Read More. Good Essays.