Poems Of Du Fu's "eight Sorrow" Study

Du Fu is not only a master who synthesized the achievement of Chinese Classic Poems inditing, but an explorer in the poetry world. Wang Yucheng once appraised Du that ZiMei's poems opened a new world of poetry. With approximate 1,500 poems, Du made outstanding achievements in different Poetry styles as well as in different themes. Among the different styles of Du's poems, the amount of five-character ancient style poems, which is 263, is only next to his five-character lyushi. There are lots of masterpieces in Du's five-character ancient-style poems, many of which are quite well-known such as Sanli Sanbie, Beizheng, Five Hundreds Words about My Feeling since Leaving Chang'an for Feng Xian, Zhuangyou, and etc. However, the Ba Ai Poem, a series of five-character ancient style poems describing figures had rarely been discussed.This dissertation picks the Ba Ai Poem as the research topic. The first chapter presents the story of Ba Ai Poem and its background, and present research into this poetic work. The second chapter is divided into eight parts. Each of the eight poems is analyzed in details through the inter-verification of character, incident, time, and place between the poem and history records, and between the poem and other poems. By textual research, the dissertation provides its own view on previous explanation of the Ba Ai Poem, and investigates the trail of each character in the poem. It tries to unfold the spiritual characteristic of the eight characters together with the specific historical context. Withal, the artistic feature and Du's emotion embodied within the 8 poems are also explored in this chapter. In the third chapter, the Ba Ai Poem is regarded as a poetry type, Series of Poems Describing Figures. It is put into the development history of Chinese classical poetry to trace the revelatory sources of the poems and its influences afterwards.Du's poetry is appraised as "rhyming history" because he relevantly describes the events of the time with perfect rhyming skill. That is greatly contributed by his five-character ancient-style poems. As a magnum opus, Ba Ai Poem presents not only the art of recording historical events, but the refinement and skill of portraying. Therefore these eight poems should be well concerned in academia.