Three farewells: newly married, homeless, and farewell.
Three Officials and Three Farewells is Du Fu's classic masterpiece, which profoundly describes people's suffering and loneliness in troubled times. It expresses the author's pain and sympathy for people devastated by war.
These six poems were written by Du Fu in a planned and arranged way in March, 759, the second year of Gan Yuan. In March of that year, 600,000 troops of the Tang Dynasty were defeated by Yecheng, and the national situation was very critical. In order to quickly replenish troops, the rulers implemented an unrestricted, unorganized and inhuman policy of the Royal Air Force. Du Fu witnessed these phenomena with his own eyes and wrote these six poems with contradictory and painful feelings. This war is different from the belligerence in Tianbao period, and it is an effort to save the country and survive.
Therefore, Du Fu, while profoundly exposing the darkness of military service, cursed "the end of heaven and earth is ruthless" and at the same time had to support this kind of military service; He not only sympathized with the people's sufferings, but also had to comfort and encourage those immature "middle-aged men" to go to the front with tears. Under the unbearable cruel oppression of the people, the wife advised her husband and mother to send their children to the battlefield one after another, and some elderly women even gave their lives. While exposing the cruelty of the ruling class, Du Fu praised the broad masses of the people with infinite sympathy and gratitude.
"Three Officials" and "Three Farewells" have different expressions. The so-called "three officials narrate with questions and answers, and three farewells are purely between the sender and the traveler." In Three Officials, Du Fu himself appeared because of the question and answer. In "Three Farewells", Du Fu did not appear, because the whole story is a monologue of the characters. From the literary origin, Three Officials and Three Farewells inherited the styles of The Book of Songs and Han Yuefu, inspired Bai Juyi's new Yuefu, and were the pinnacle of Du Fu's realistic creation.