The speaker spends a spring day at home, wandering from sun to shade, watching hawks and long shadows and breathing in lilac scent. But the day is mostly spent reading. The subtitle points to a book of Du Fu's poems in David Young's translation, and the speaker is so absorbed that the afternoon slips past, and twelve centuries almost seem to disappear.
Then the poem turns reflective. The speaker considers what has changed since Du Fu's time: men now write love poems to their wives, or take on the voices of conscripts and laundry women. Other things sound more troubling, such as the line about mountains and rivers going to ruin while the state survives. The mood is quiet, drifting and a little wistful. Spring is beautiful but brief, the petals are already gone, and the closing image of the sinking moon and the unreachable Chang'an suggests that the past can be visited only in dreams, or perhaps in poetry.