"Too hot in the sun / too cool in the shade": the speaker begins by pacing from one side of the house to the other, unable to settle. That restlessness sets up a poem about being in two places at once, in a spring garden and inside a book. The title names a volume of Du Fu's poetry in David Young's translations, so we know what has been absorbing the speaker all afternoon.
The poem is built from short, unrhymed couplets, with almost no punctuation until the full stops that close each half. Lines run two to four beats and often break in the middle of a thought, so that phrases hang for a moment before resolving. "Immersed in a life's / worth of poetry" leaves "a life's" briefly stranded. "While twelve centuries seemed / almost to vanish" ends its line on "seemed," which is the very word that admits the illusion. Without rhyme or fixed metre, the rhythm comes from breath and pause, which suits a mind drifting between a page and a window.
The first half is a run of small, exact observations. Breezes "ripple / through the young grass," so the wind becomes visible as movement. Hawks "slide sideways / along the ridge," and the plain verb and the odd, accurate adverb catch how a bird rides air without flapping. The crabapple is "aglow" in late sun, and then comes the most surprising image, "long shadows fill / with lilac scent." Shadows become containers, and sight turns into smell. The scene is quiet, domestic and unshowy, much as one might expect from a poet reading classical Chinese verse in translation.
Then the poem turns on a small confession: "I've let another spring day / come & go." It sounds like guilt, as if reading has cost the speaker the real spring. Yet the first half of the poem is the evidence against that charge, because someone who had missed the day could not have described it so closely. The poem quietly argues that the book and the garden are not rivals. Attention to one sharpens attention to the other. Even so, loss enters, since the wind has "stripped the last petals" from the cherry tree. Spring is ending while the speaker reads, and the hedge in "seemed / almost to vanish" admits that the closeness across centuries is felt but not complete.
The second half moves from sensory scene to reflection, and the voice grows tentative: "I think," "I'm afraid." The speaker takes stock of what has changed since Du Fu's day, and the list is oddly modest. Men now write love poems to their wives, or in "the voices of conscripts / or laundry women." The Three Gorges would be "unrecognizable," and the poem leaves the cause unstated, so the change feels vast and impersonal. Then comes the sharpest line: "mountains & rivers go to ruin these days / while the state survives." One of Du Fu's best-known lines says the state is broken but mountains and rivers remain. Here the order is reversed, and the speaker's own age is set against the old poet's, with nature as the casualty. The ampersand in "mountains & rivers" and in "come & go" gives the classical phrasing a casual, typed, contemporary look.
The ending ties the poem's two movements together. In the first half the sun sets the crabapple aglow, and in the second the "crescent moon sink[s] / toward the horizon." The day is closing, and sleep is close behind. That sets up the last couplet: "Chang'an remains attainable / only in dreams." Chang'an, the Tang capital, stands for Du Fu's whole vanished world, and the speaker can reach it only through imagination, which is what reading and translation offer. The first half's "almost vanish" thus finds its answer: the distance is never fully closed, but it can be crossed at night.
The poem matters because it shows what reading old poetry feels like from the inside. It is not reverence from a distance but a conversation held in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, with hawks on the ridge and petals coming down. It never claims the gap between centuries can be closed. It simply notices the gap, and notices the spring, and lets the two share one page.