Let your west neighbor pick up dates before the hall!
A sonless woman now in want of food and all.
Could she pick dates if she were not poor to excess?
You should be kind to her to make her fear you less.
She might be over cautious to be kept away.
Why should you put up a fence in your neighbor’s way?
Stricken to the bones, so pitiable she appears.
Thinking of the war flames, how can I not shed tears!
堂前扑枣任西邻，无食无儿一妇人。
不为困穷宁有此？只缘恐惧转须亲。
即防远客虽多事，使插疏篱却甚真。
已诉征求贫到骨，正思戎马泪盈巾。
Du Fu’s You Cheng Wu Lang (又呈吴郎)—composed during his late Kuizhou residency around 767 AD—stands as one of the most micro-conceptually profound humanitarian documents in the classical canon. The poem opens by negotiating a boundary dispute over a domestic asset: Tang qian pu zao ren xi lin, wu shi wu er yi fu ren. (堂前扑枣任西邻，无食无儿一妇人。). Du Fu writes to his relative Wu Lang, to whom he had passed ownership of his cottage, pleading that a poor neighborhood woman be allowed to continue shaking down the jujubes (zao) from the tree directly in front of the main hall (tang qian). Through a materialist and sociological lens, Du Fu subverts the absolute laws of private property. He frames the fruit tree not as an exclusive legal commodity, but as an open common resource vital to the survival of a "destitute woman with no food and no sons" (wu shi wu er). The jujube tree is transformed from a landscape ornament into an essential micro-economic buffer against starvation.
The internal movement of the verse performs a brilliant, diagnostic analysis of marginalized psychology, shifting the text from a simple legal request into an advanced ethic of care: Bu wei kun qiong ning you ci? 只缘恐惧转须亲。 (不为困穷宁有此？只缘恐惧转须亲。). The poet poses a rhetorical question—"If not driven by absolute, crushing poverty (kun qiong), would she ever resort to this?"—effectively stripping her intrusion of any criminal or malicious intent. He then delivers his supreme psychological intervention: because her socio-economic vulnerability instills a deep, constant state of fear (kong ju) of the property owner, the elite intellectual must respond with increased intimacy and kinship (zhuan xu qin). Du Fu argues that the presence of the poor requires an active de-escalation of authority, demanding that the landlord exchange bureaucratic discipline for radical, neighborly reassurance.
The parallel couplet confronts the physical infrastructure of property enforcement, exposing the cold ideological weight behind a simple agrarian fence: Ji fang yuan ke sui duo shi, shi cha shu li que shen zhen. (即防远客虽多事，使插疏篱却甚真。). Wu Lang’s construction of a "sparse hedge" (shu li) to guard against this "distant guest" or outsider is dismissed by Du Fu as an absurdly defensive "excess of business" (duo shi). Yet, the hedge is recognized as devastatingly "real" or "true" (zhen) in its material consequences. Through a structuralist critique, the fence operates as a mechanism of class segregation. It cuts off the desperate woman from her traditional foraging rights, proving that even the most fragile, organic barrier can function as a violent, exclusionary wall when deployed by the propertied class to protect a minor surplus.
The masterpiece achieves its immortal status by violently expanding its focus from a quiet courtyard dispute to the total structural collapse of the Tang state: Yi su zheng qiu pin dao gu, zheng si rong ma lei ying jin. (已诉征求贫到骨，正思戎马泪盈巾。). The woman's gathering of jujubes is contextualized by her crushing confession: the state's extortionate wartime taxation and labor levies (zheng qiu) have scraped her resources "down to the bare bones" (pin dao gu). The closing line collapses the micro-tragedy of the fruit tree directly into the macro-horror of the An Lushan Rebellion's endless aftermath—the poet "meditates on the eternal warfare" (zheng si rong ma) until his tears saturate his cloth (lei ying jin). The poem stands as a definitive monument of political conscience, demonstrating that a true intellectual master cannot look at a domestic boundary line without seeing the raw, bleeding fractures of a dying empire, converting a simple letter into a cosmic cry for structural mercy.
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