吾道長悠悠 : 杜甫の自覺

Abstract

Tu Fu wrote a large quantity of poetry from an early age, and his associates were quick to recognize his talents in that direction. Yet he himself found little satisfaction in his repute as a poet; his ambition was rather to participate in the government and to aid in the reform of the nation. The poems written before his fortieth year (759) lament his lack of success in realizing this ambition, and at the same time describe the hardships of the common people, which he viewed as his own misfortune and his own responsibility. In 759 he journeyed to Ch'in-chou and the poems written thereafter have a marked tone of introspection. Among them, that entitled "Wu Tao" or "My Way, " while serving to set forth his political and ethical ideal--the ideals of Confucian teachings--in a larger sense conveys his doubts and questionings with regard to his own proper way in life. "Which way should my road lead?" he asks (Ch'in-chou tsashih No. 3), and we sense that, in the midst of his struggle to stay alive in the strife-torn world of his time, he has lost confidence in the direction of his life. After three months in Ch'in-chou, he left for the southwest, arriving finally in Ch'eng-tu. In the poem which he composed at the time of his departure, we find the following couplet : "Vast indeed is the scope of Heaven and Earth ; My road stretches distant and without end." The road which he thought he had lost appeared again before his. eyes, stretching endlessly away into the distance. The 3rd century poet Juan Chi (210-262) was said to have wept when the road which he had pursuing in his carriage suddenly came to an end. But the road which Tu Fu found confronting him had no end in sight. That road, which he knew he must follow to the end of his life, was, I believe, the road of poetry. Though it was not his primary desire to become a poet, destiny forced this road upon him, and the poem, it would seem, expresses his first clear awakening to the fact of that destiny.