Du Mu

Du Mu a Chinese poet and official of the late Tang dynasty, remembered for his elegant and vivid verse, his love of wine and romance, and his lifelong engagement with the troubled politics of a declining empire. He is one of the most accessible of the late Tang poets and a central figure in the poetry of the ninth century.

Life and Background

Du Mu was born in 803 into a distinguished family of officials and scholars that traced its descent from the great historian and statesman Du You and included the poet Du Fu among its distant relations. His family's standing gave him a thorough education and connections at court, and he was a precocious student of the classics, history and military affairs.

He passed the imperial examination in 828 and entered the public service, holding a succession of official posts in the capital and in the provinces. He served as a military adviser to senior commanders and as a local magistrate and prefect, and his career was marked by genuine administrative ability as well as by the literary fame that followed him everywhere.

He was known for his temperament as much as for his talent. He was fond of wine, music and the society of women, and his poems record with frankness his pleasures and his excesses. Yet he was also a serious student of strategy and government, a writer of memorials on reform and defence, and a man who grieved over the decay of the dynasty he served.

Poetry and Style

Du Mu excelled above all in the quatrain and in the regulated verse, forms in which his genius for the vivid single image and the telling phrase could shine. His poems are clear, graceful and strongly visual, and they have a lightness of touch that conceals considerable technical skill. He is one of the easiest of Chinese poets to read and to remember.

He wrote of landscapes and seasons, of the passing of time, of love and parting, and of the great historical sites of the empire. Many of his finest poems are meditations upon places associated with the events of earlier dynasties, in which the ruins of the past prompt reflections on the transience of glory, a theme dear to the poetry of the late Tang.

Among his most famous poems are those on the Red Cliff, the site of the great battle of the Three Kingdoms, and his verses on the autumn and on parting. His habit of ending a poem with an unexpected turn or a sudden image is one of the marks of his art, and it gives even his lightest pieces a depth that repays rereading.

History, Politics and Reform

Du Mu was a serious political thinker. He wrote on military strategy, on the reform of the administration and on the defence of the northern frontier, and he was concerned with the practical problems of a state weakened by factional conflict, eunuch power and provincial separatism. His sense of the grandeur of the past made him all the more sensitive to the shortcomings of the present.

His historical poems and his comments on earlier dynasties express a strong sense of the lessons of history. He wrote of the rise and fall of empires, of the vanity of ambition and the fragility of prosperity, and he drew from the past warnings for his own age. This reflexiveness, at once nostalgic and critical, is characteristic of the poetry of the late Tang.

He held a number of important offices and at times his advice was sought on matters of policy. Yet the disorder of the times frustrated the reformer as it frustrated the poet, and much of his public writing records a sense of opportunity lost and of a dynasty slipping toward its end.

The Fengliu Reputation

Du Mu's popular reputation rests in large part on his image as the fengliu poet and official, the man of taste and passion who moved gracefully through the pleasure quarters of the great cities and celebrated the beauties he encountered. This figure, part truth and part legend, has made him the representative of a certain worldly and romantic ideal of Chinese literary culture.

His poems on the entertainment districts of Yangzhou and Luoyang, on courtesans and musicians and on the pleasures of wine and song, are among the most quoted in the language. They are frank, graceful and free of hypocrisy, and they record both the enjoyment and the melancholy that attended a life given to pleasure in a fading age.

This side of his work has sometimes obscured his seriousness, but the two are connected. The pursuit of beauty and the consciousness of decline belong together in his verse, and his gaiety is shadowed by the knowledge that the world he loved was passing away. It is this combination that gives his poetry its particular tone.

Influence and Legacy

Du Mu is honoured as one of the last great poets of the Tang and as a master of the short lyric. His poems were admired and imitated throughout the later dynasties, and his clear and vivid manner influenced poets who valued directness and grace. He shares with Li Shangyin the distinction of being the finest poet of the late Tang.

His treatment of historical themes, in which the landscape itself seems to remember the past, shaped the way later Chinese poets wrote about place and memory. The meditative historical quatrain that he perfected became a standard form, used by countless successors to comment on the passing of dynasties.

His personal legend, too, has been enduring. The wandering poet and official, moved by wine and beauty and the thought of vanished ages, remains a favourite image of the Chinese imagination, and his poems are among the most frequently anthologised and memorised in the language.

See also

• Li Shangyin
• Tang poetry
• Late Tang poetry
• Regulated verse