Summary
This post explores Du Fu’s poem “Day’s End” in terms of the key characteristics of contemporary English-language haibun composition. It also explores the value of modelling the work of writers whose poetry touches you as a way of expanding your writing repertoire.
Introduction
Some years ago, I was interested in expanding my reading from Japanese Masters (Basho and Issa) to Chinese Masters and somehow found my way to Du Fu’s poems. It was frustrating that it was so difficult to find the work of Du Fu and other Asian masters in online sources, particularly in light of Harvard professor Stephen Owen’s comment: “We have Dante, Shakespeare and Du Fu (712-770). These poets create the very values by which poetry is judged.” If Du Fu is so highly regarded by the world’s literary scholars, why is it that the Chinese poet-sage Du Fu . . . an immortal in the East Asian cultural sphere, still remains largely unknown in the Western world, and particularly unknown by poetry enthusiasts?
I liked what I found in Du Fu’s writing. As with Basho and Issa, it warmed me to think I could relate to the experiences and poetic sensibilities of a person writing in 8th century China to my own experiences in 21st century Canada. He’d communicated not just from another country, but across a gap 1300 years. Perhaps it’s because the joys and sorrows of the lived life, despite all our luxuries, hasn’t changed that much.
Day’s End
by Du Fu
Oxen and sheep were brought back down
Long ago, and bramble gates closed. Over
Mountains and rivers, far from my old garden,
A windswept moon rises into clear night.
Springs trickle down dark cliffs, and autumn
Dew fills ridgeline grasses. My hair seems
Whiter in lamplight. The flame flickers
Good fortune over and over — and for what?
Comments:
Du Fu’s writing preceeded the first Japanese travel haibun by several centuries. I’m using it here to compare with haibun prose because Basho often read and was influenced by the work of Chinese poets.
Title as Kigo (Seasonal/Temporal Marker) and Imagistic, Sensory Prose
English-language haibun combines title, prose and haiku, blending the title’s significand with the elegance of the prose the precision of haiku. The title and prose sets a scene, describes a moment or experience, while the haiku underscores the emotions or themes.
Du Fu’s title d sets a temporal frame (dusk/nightfall) that governs the entire poem’s mood, just as a contemporary haibun title is expected to orient the reader in time and atmosphere before the prose begins.
The poem’s body reads as concentrated prose-poetry, built from discrete sensory images: oxen returning, gates closing, moonrise, trickling springs, dew on grasses, lamplight on white hair. Scholar Ueda characterized haibun by “its dependence on imagery,” noting that “a sentence impregnated with images extends the borders of the reader’s imagination, because it is not intellectualized.” Du Fu’s writing resists abstraction — each line is a concrete observation before the final turn into personal reflection, a structure haibun practitioners deliberately cultivate.
There is not spacially independent haiku in Du Fu’s piece. Again, Du Fu’s work preceeded Japanese haiku and may have influenced it. However, the closing couplet rewritten are haiku like in that there’s a strong shift from the physical environment described in the title and prose.
my hair
seems whiter
in lamplight.
the flame flickers
good fortune over and over —
and for what?
Both are different that most published haiku, but they create an after-image this is much like Yuasa’s statement that the relationship of prose to haiku is like that of the earth to the moon.
The two poems operate exactly as a prose-to-haiku pivot. “My hair seems / whiter in lamplight” is still observational — imagistic, detached, sensory. It shifts to a different observational setting. “The flame flickers / good fortune over and over — and for what?” breaks the detachment entirely. The self erupts. The kigo of lamplight collapses into existential vertigo. This is the aware — the ache of transience — that the whole poem has been building toward without announcing itself.
The problem for haiku is that “and for what?” is rhetorical protest. Ueda’s criterion holds that no good haibun is an emotional outburst. The question is whether a haiku can honor the couplet’s grief while restoring the detachment and compression the form requires.
Detachment and the Withheld Self
A traditional haibun feature is detachment from, and even complete absence of, the speaker — an avoidance of personal pronouns like “I.” Du Fu’s poem maintains this posture through nearly its entire length: the landscape is observed, not narrated in the first person. The self appears only obliquely (“my hair,” “my old garden”) and late, which mirrors the haibun aesthetic of letting scene precede interiority.
The Pivot Toward Existential Question
The haiku in haibun should deepen the meaning of the whole, either by offering a startling juxtaposition or a reflection of one of the themes in the prose. Du Fu’s closing couplet — the flickering flame and the unanswered “for what?” — performs this function structurally.
After the sustained imagistic prose, it delivers the compressed, reverberating question that a haiku would supply in formal haibun: a moment of aware (bittersweet transience) that reframes everything preceding it.
Travel, Displacement, and Nature as Subject
Bashō wrote haibun as travel accounts during his various journeys, and his shorter haibun include landscape scenes, anecdotal vignettes, and character sketches. Du Fu’s poem is rooted in the same tradition: he is displaced from his “old garden,” viewing an unfamiliar mountain landscape — the classic haibun posture of the traveler-observer whose estrangement sharpens perception.
Biographical Details from various resources:
Du Fu (Tu Fu; 712–770) was a Chinese poet and politician of the Tang dynasty. Here are the key biographical details relevant to understanding his work, including “Day’s End”: – Wikipedia
Origins and family
Known as the “Sage of Poetry,” Du Fu was born into an aristocratic family in Gong County, Henan Province, received a strict traditional Confucian education, wrote his first poems at age seven, and was associating with the literati by age fourteen. His family had lost their fortunes and lived in poverty despite earnings higher than the average family of the period. Du Fu lost his mother when still young and was raised by an aunt, and also lost an older brother around the same time. – Encyclopedia.comTotally History
Failure and wandering
Du Fu failed the imperial examinations of 735, and as a result spent much of his youth traveling, during which he won renown as a poet and met other poets of the period, including the great Li Bai. After a brief flirtation with Daoism while traveling with Li Bai, Du Fu returned to the capital and to the conventional Confucianism of his youth. He petitioned the government for an official position and was appointed registrar in the crown prince’s palace, though the An Lushan Rebellion of 755 prevented him from occupying the post. – Encyclopedia Britannica
The rebellion and its consequences
The An Lushan Rebellion (755–763) is the pivot of his life and work. He was an eyewitness to the historical events in a critical period that saw a great, prosperous nation ruined by military rebellions and wars with border tribes. Eager to serve the country, Du Fu was helpless in stopping its disasters and could only faithfully record in poems his own observations and feelings. – Notable Biographies
The wandering years and “Day’s End”
In 760 he arrived in Chengdu in Sichuan and lived for five years in a “thatched hut” — today’s Du Fu’s Thatched Cottage in Chengdu — and in this time in comparative solitude away from Chang’an he said he lived happily. The mountain setting of “Day’s End,” with its mood of displacement and the speaker far from his “old garden,” belongs squarely to this period of enforced exile and itinerancy. – China Highlights
The body of work
Some 1,400 poems by Du Fu have survived. The few extant poems from his early years are confident and heroic, far different from the pessimistic poems he wrote later. The turning point in his poetry came with “The Ballad of the Army Wagons,” the first poem of the Tang era that overtly criticized a government policy — in this case, conscription. While some of his poems reflect his mood in happier moments, most tell of his poverty, his separation from and longings for his family, his terrible life during the war, and his encounters with refugees, draftees, and recruiting officers.
– Encyclopedia.comNotable Biographies
Death
He died in 770, on a riverboat between Danzhou and Yueyang, Hunan province — still traveling, still displaced, at 57 or 58. – Encyclopedia Britannica
The biographical arc matters enormously for reading “Day’s End.” The white hair, the distant garden, the question “for what?” — these are not literary postures. They come from a man who spent his adult life failing examinations, fleeing war, watching an empire collapse, and dying on a boat. The aware of the closing couplet is entirely earned.
Using Du Fu as a Model in haiku Composition.
This link takes you to my haibun “Day’s End”. I used Du Fu’s poem as a model for my haibun, but, of course, I used my own context from my extensive travels in the Southwest USA.
If ever you’ve visited an ancient or historical site and felt moved by your experiences, you can use Du Fu’s poem and my haibun as a model for composing a piece about your experience.
Ray Rasmussen: All Things Haibun Blog 