An Introduction to Tu Fu's "Eight Autumn Poems"

The later poems of Tu-fu were criticized severely by Chu-hsi 朱熹 the master of Sung neo-Confucianism, by their looseness and ambiguity. The author of this article attemps to appreciate these poems' ambiguity as an accomplishment of the poet's art, which might be compared to Shakespeare's "opacity", a criticism given by T. S. Eliot. For instance, "叢菊兩開他日淚" a line in the first of "Eight Autumn Poems" is subject to numerous interpretations or translations none of which exhaust the real content of this line. The characters are no longer written in the usual order, but include an intuitional element, which elude any precision. On the other hand, the author finds that some lines are fictitious, i. e. imagery due to the poet's imagination, as, for example, in the last couplet of the second of the "Eight Autumn Poems": 請看石上藤蘿月, 已映洲前蘆荻花