杜甫と月

Abstract

The moonlight in Tu Fu's poems is often pale and trembling neither merely because of the sadness of the scenes it falls upon. --e. g., a battlefield strewn with the bodies of war victims, or the tomb of a concubine--nor merely because of the fact that the moonlight is beheld simultaneously by persons who are forced to live apart on this earth. Rather it is the nature of moonlight to be pale and trembling. Such moonlight seems to differ from that described by earlier poets, for whom the moon shone brightly and clearly, usually with a connotation of pleasure, though sometimes with one of sadness. The fu or rhyme-prose on the moon by Hsieh Chuang 謝莊 (421-466) is perhaps the best example of this view. Sometimes Tu Fu also tried to follow the way of his predecessors. He also endeavored to praise the beauty of the moon, especially in poems dedicated to his patrons. According to the theory of a Sung critic, Chu Pien 朱弁 Tu Fu was in fact the first poet to appreciate the special beauty of the moon at the Mid-Autumn Night, i. e., the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, which is now generally considered in the Far East to be the most beautiful season of the moon. However, the moon still tended to be pale in Tu Fu's eyes, and in some poems he seemed to regard it as a mystic being whose meaning is difficult for human beings to comprehend.