Du Fu Five Meter Seven-character Poems Research

Dufu was the outstanding poet in Chinese literature history with productive fruits in his life, among which 5-and-7-word rhythmic suite poems were one of the most highlighting fruits. Dufu’s creation period consisted of four, namely, the trying period from 748,749 AD (the sixth, seventh year of Tianbao period) to 757 AD (the end of Tianbao period before An Lushan and Shi Siming Rebellion in Tang Dynasty); the exploring period from 757 AD (after An Lushan and Shi Siming Rebellion) to 759 AD before he moved to Sichuan; the developing period from 760 AD (the first year of Shangyuan period when he moved to Sichuan) to 765 AD (the first year of Yongtai period when he moved out of Yun’an); the maturing period from 766 AD (the end of the first year of Dali period when he moved to Kuizhou) to 770 AD (the fifth year of Dali period). Dufu’s 5-and-7-word rhythmic suite poems were extremely rich in content presentation featured with politics, event recordings, and travel notes, rewarding and answering for friends, countryside description, political comments, expressions of history and ancient times, and few narrations of objects, autographing pictures. Dufu’s 5-and-7-word rhythmic suite poems are of peculiarly various structures with different suite poems for different presentation which make the poems in a clear sequence and piece together like one single poem. Dufu applied flexible time-space transforming method to present the vast time-space background, breaking through the linear rule with recombination of morning and evening, ancient and present time, history and reality. At the same time, Dufu overlay objects in different spaces for creation to change the sceneries of suite poems in far and close, high and low, moving and stabilizing aspects. The frequently changed creation in suite poems established huge and spacious time-space background. Dufu’s 5-and-7-word rhythmic suite poems usually were composed as a poem, in which he referred the creation of composition to make the suite poems performed extremely and abundantly with utmost narrating, spreading the spectacle, and vividly detailed description. Literary quotations in suite poems must be often employed for abundant reflection in limited words because the presentation forms of suite poems are very strict. Dufu’s 5-word suite poems were characteristic with applying literary quotation system which showed in two aspects. One aspect referred that there was a literary quotation system in every single poem in suite poems; another aspect meant that one literary quotation in each single poem in suite poems presented the accumulation effect as a whole in the suite poems. Applying literary quotation system y Dufu broke through the presentation limitation of 5-and-7-word rhythmic suite poems, and enriched the presentation of them greatly.