In the Library
The Thatched House Unroofed by an Autumn Gale
Du Fu, 761 CE
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 minutes
- Translated by
- Translated by Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell (1921)
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 0k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
A great shelter where all the Empire's shivering scholars could have happy faces
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Quiet Night Thoughts
Li Bai
Quiet Night Thoughts does the same thing, but in twenty characters and with nothing at stake beyond a man awake in a strange room, missing home.
£1.99
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Matsuo Bashō
Basho revered Du Fu, and at Hiraizumi he weeps over his line about a ruined country where mountains and rivers remain, a poet of the road answering a poet of the storm.
£1.99
About the book
In the eighth month the wind comes down on his cottage outside Chengdu and takes the roof off in three layers. The thatch goes over the river and hangs in the tops of the trees; boys from the village opposite gather up what falls and run into the bamboo with it while he shouts himself hoarse, gives up, and walks back leaning on his stick. Then the rain starts. His quilt is years old and cold as iron, his small son kicks a hole in it, the bed is in the wet, and the night will not end. Du Fu was about fifty when he wrote this, out of office, living on the kindness of friends, six years into a rebellion that had already starved one of his children. What makes The Thatched House Unroofed by an Autumn Gale the poem the Chinese have kept for twelve hundred years is what it does in its last lines, which is to stop thinking about his own roof. He wishes instead for a house of ten thousand rooms, standing solid in wind and rain, wide enough to shelter every cold person in the empire; and he says that if he could see it built he would lie in his own ruined hut and freeze to death content.