94. In the Second Year of Zhide I Escaped the Capital Through the Jinguang Gate and Made My Way to Fengxiang; Early in the Qianyuan Era I Was Moved from Reminder of the Left to a Post at Huazhou, and Leaving by This Gate I Was Moved by the Past | Du Fu

杜甫有几个长题诗，这道题把时间、地点、身世交代得非常细：至德二载从金光门出逃，间道归凤翔，乾元初任左拾遗，后调华州掾，与亲友告别，又出此门，因而悲往事。写这么长的题目，等于把作诗的缘由完整留档。后人读时，不需要额外查证也能明白「此门」为何触动他——同一道门，前一次是通过它去投奔朝廷，这一次是通过它去外任，处境正好相反。

Du Fu has several poems with long titles, and this one specifies time, place, and life circumstance in detail: escaping through the Jinguang Gate in the second year of Zhide, reaching Fengxiang by side roads, serving as Reminder of the Left early in the Qianyuan era, being moved to a Huazhou post and bidding friends farewell, and passing through this gate again — hence the grief over past things. Such a title archives the occasion whole. A later reader needs no lookup to see why this gate moves him — the same gate, first passed to go over to the throne, now passed to take a post in the provinces, the circumstances exactly reversed.

这一联从个人的惊惧扩大到战乱中的死者。安史之乱使中原人口锐减，杜甫后来在《北征》里写「所遇多被伤，呻吟更流血」，可见当时景象。用「招魂」这个楚辞里的词，是把眼前的惨状接到一个古老的哀悼传统上——死了的人需要有人为他们招魂，而战乱中无人来做这件事。一句诗同时写了死者和活着的人的无能为力。

This couplet widens from personal terror to the dead of the war. The An Lushan Rebellion cut the population of the central plains drastically, and Du Fu later wrote in Going North that most he met were wounded, groaning and bleeding, which shows what it was like. To use the word summons, from the Chu elegies, joins the present horror to an old tradition of mourning: the dead need someone to call their souls home, and in war no one does. One line writes both the dead and the helplessness of the living.

全诗写到末句才出现一个身体动作：驻马。前面三联都是叙述和感慨，到这里突然定住——马停了，人回头望。这个动作比任何抒情都直接，因为它不分说，只做。杜甫被贬离京，本该心灰意冷地走，他却停下来回望重重宫门，舍不得的到底是什么，读者自己会想。唐诗常以动作收尾，这个动作要能替前面所有的话作结，杜甫选得很准。

Only in the last line does the poem produce a physical gesture: halting the horse. The three couplets before are narration and reflection, and here everything stops — the horse halts, the man looks back. No gesture says more directly, for it does not explain, it only does. Demoted and leaving the capital, Du Fu should have ridden off in dejection; instead he stops and gazes at the gates. The reader supplies what he cannot bear to leave. Tang poems often close on a gesture, and the gesture must sum up everything before it; Du Fu chooses exactly.