Chunwang (poem) country of origin Tang dynasty
"Chunwang" (Chinese: 春望; pinyin: Chūnwàng) is a poem by Tang dynasty poet Du Fu, written after the fall of Chang'an to rebel forces led by An Lushan, as part of the civil war that began in 755. Literary critics have recognised it as one of Du's best and best-known works.Background
Du Fu was a Chinese poet who was active in the Tang dynasty. In 755, during the reign of Emperor Xuanzong, Du was in the capital city of Chang'an (present-day Xi'an) when the An Lushan Rebellion began. "Chunwang" was written in 757, nine months after the fall of Chang'an to An's army. Its title comprises the Chinese characters for "spring" ("chun" or 春) and "looking into the distance" ("wang" or 望). In the poem, Du laments the rapid defeat of the imperial forces and what, to his mind, signals the end of the Tang dynasty.Structure
"Chunwang" is an example of what was known in the Tang dynasty as wuyan lüshi (五言律詩), a genre known for its strict and complex structural rules. The poem is made up of eight lines consisting of five characters each, creating four couplets, with the second and third couplets containing parallelism. For instance, the verbs meaning "feel" and "hate" are paired together, as are the nouns for "bird" and "flower". There is also a change of grammatical construction: the subjects of the second couplet ("bird" and "flower") appear in the middle of each line, whereas those of the third couplet ("beacon fire" and "letter from home") appear in the beginning of each line.However, the poem's exact rhyme scheme is unclear because the pronunciation of classical Chinese characters using pinyin (a modern transliteration system introduced in the 1950s) is distinct from what they would have sounded like in the Tang dynasty. 21st-century Chinese literary critic Zong-Qi Cai posited that the poem follows a "conventional" ABCB DBEB pattern.
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