将赴成都草堂途中有作先寄严郑公五首其四

Meaning

Written on the road back to his long-abandoned thatched cottage outside Chengdu and sent ahead to his patron Yan Wu, this poem moves from the garden's decay — sand collapsing into the herb-bed rail, rapids falling past the river balustrade — to a burst of moral passion: the young pines should grow a thousand feet, and every stalk of harmful bamboo should be cut down. Du Fu then admits plainly that his livelihood depends on his powerful friend, and closes with the confession that three years of flight and famine have wasted him to skin and bone, and that the roads of the world are truly hard.

常苦沙崩损药栏，也从江槛落风湍。新松恨不高千尺，恶竹应须斩万竿。生理祗凭黄阁老，衰颜欲付紫金丹。三年奔走空皮骨，信有人间行路难。

Appreciation

[Plain Paraphrase] Writing to his patron Yan Wu on the road back to his thatched cottage, Du Fu first mourns the garden's ruin — the crumbling sand has carried away the herb-bed rail, and wind-driven rapids fall past the river balustrade. He then declares his passions: he hates that the young pines he planted are not taller, and he would cut down every stalk of the harmful bamboo. Admitting that his living depends on the 'old man of the Yellow Pavilion,' he would trust his withered face even to alchemy. Three years of wandering have left him skin and bone, and he ends with the ballad-title confession that the roads of the world are hard. [Structure] The eight lines move in four steps — ruin of the garden, moral indignation, personal dependence, and final reflection — each couplet turning the feeling a stage deeper, the way a private letter becomes a poem about a whole broken age. [Imagery] The famous couplet about the new pines and the evil bamboo symbolizes love and hatred: the pines stand for all that is fresh, upright and hopeful (the young shoots he planted at the cottage), the bamboo for all that chokes and spreads. Read as allegory, the lines sum up Du Fu's view of a world after rebellion in which good things grow too slowly and bad things too fast. [Feeling] The poem's weight lies in its honesty: grief, anger, gratitude and resignation are all admitted plainly, which is exactly what later critics meant by Du Fu's 'heavy and sombre' style.

【白话串讲】 杜甫写《将赴成都草堂途中有作先寄严郑公五首其四》：“常苦沙崩损药栏，也从江槛落风湍”——“新松恨不高千尺，恶竹应须斩万竿”——“生理祗凭黄阁老，衰颜欲付紫金丹”——“三年奔走空皮骨，信有人间行路难”——他寄严武——新松恨不高千尺。 【意象与手法】 “常苦沙崩损药栏，也从江槛落风湍”写药栏沙崩；“新松恨不高千尺，恶竹应须斩万竿”以新松恶竹写爱憎；“生理祗凭黄阁老，衰颜欲付紫金丹”写生理凭黄阁老；结以“三年奔走空皮骨，信有人间行路难”写行路难。沉郁咏志。 【情感与主旨】 杜甫寄严武之作，写草堂荒废与“新松恨不高千尺，恶竹应须斩万竿”的鲜明爱憎，以“信有人间行路难”写奔走的艰辛，是杜甫七律中的名篇。 【名句点睛】 常考“新松恨不高千尺，恶竹应须斩万竿”以新松恶竹写爱憎；“三年奔走空皮骨，信有人间行路难”写行路难。

Allusions

Three allusions carry the poem's weight. 'The old man of the Yellow Pavilion' refers to Yan Wu: in Han times the chancellor's office was hung with yellow curtains, so 'Yellow Pavilion' became a metonym for the premiership, and the phrase is at once a respectful title for the poet's powerful friend and a plain admission of dependence. 'Purple-gold elixir' is the Taoist drug of immortality; to entrust his 'withered face' to it is to grasp even at alchemy for relief from age and exhaustion — half serious, half despairing joke. The closing 'the roads of the world are hard' echoes the old ballad title Xing Lu Nan ('Hard Is the Road'), whose tradition runs from the Han singers' 'running east and west' to Li Bai's 'the road is hard — harder than climbing the blue sky'; Du Fu turns the public title into his private confession, so that a letter to a friend ends in the voice of every wanderer.

诗中「常苦沙崩损药栏也从江槛落风湍」「新松恨不高千尺恶竹应须斩万竿」「生理祗凭黄阁老衰颜欲付紫金丹」「三年奔走空皮骨信有人间行路难」等语，皆含典故故实。「常苦沙崩损药栏也从江槛落风湍」写常苦沙崩损药栏也从江槛落风湍；「新松恨不高千尺恶竹应须斩万竿」写新松恨不高千尺恶竹应须斩万竿；「生理祗凭黄阁老衰颜欲付紫金丹」用黄阁老之典（黄阁老写宰相），写生理祗凭黄阁老衰颜欲付紫金丹；「三年奔走空皮骨信有人间行路难」用行路难之典（行路难写乐府题），写三年奔走空皮骨信有人间行路难。诗人用黄阁老、行路难之典入诗，不着痕迹，而把感怀咏志之情写得真切可感，是善于熔铸典故的体现。此等用典之法，熔铸古今而不着痕迹，既不炫博以示学，亦不拘泥于旧解，正见诗人学养之深与运思之巧。读者于此等处尤当细心玩味，方能领会其言外之旨与味外之味。

Commentary

This is the poem Du Fu sent ahead to Yan Wu, and it has always been read as a letter of gratitude that does not disguise exhaustion. Critics have especially prized the pine-and-bamboo couplet: it became proverbial as a statement of moral indignation, quoted whenever one wished to say that good must be made to grow fast and evil cut down at the root. Qing and later scholars placed it among Du Fu's finest regulated couplets, and the final line, borrowing the ballad title 'Hard Is the Road,' has been admired as the perfect marriage of the popular song tradition to the strictest poetic form. For later readers the poem is also a document of the scholar's predicament after the rebellion: a great poet reduced to asking his friend for his living, and turning the asking into art.

这首《将赴成都草堂途中有作先寄严郑公五首其四》，是杜甫写感怀咏志之作，写常苦沙崩损药栏、新松恨不高千尺、生理祗凭黄阁老、信有人间行路难之情，沉郁咏志。起「常苦沙崩损药栏，也从江槛落风湍」——常苦沙崩损药栏，也从江槛落风湍。写常苦沙崩损药栏：常苦沙崩损药栏、也从江槛落风湍——损药栏、落风湍；「新松恨不高千尺，恶竹应须斩万竿」——新松恨不高千尺，恶竹应须斩万竿。写新松恨不高千尺：新松恨不高千尺、恶竹应须斩万竿——高千尺、斩万竿；「生理祗凭黄阁老，衰颜欲付紫金丹」——生理祗凭黄阁老，衰颜欲付紫金丹。写生理祗凭黄阁老：生理祗凭黄阁老、衰颜欲付紫金丹——黄阁老、紫金丹；结「三年奔走空皮骨，信有人间行路难」——三年奔走空皮骨，信有人间行路难。写信有人间行路难：三年奔走空皮骨、信有人间行路难——空皮骨、行路难。这「三年奔走空皮骨，信有人间行路难」，是全诗之结：以信有人间行路难写其咏志。全诗沉郁咏志，以松写情，正是杜甫诗中的名篇。

Prosody

Line by line

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