Three Poems by Lu You and Du Fu in Cursive Script

This handscroll consists of a pair of calligraphies. The one on the right, a transcription of a poem by Lu You (1125–1210), is dedicated to Li Ming (Richard Lai). The one on the left, written for Lin Taiyi, transcribes two poems by Du Fu (712–770): the seventh poem from "Eight Poems on Autumn Moods" and "Thinking of Li Bai on a Spring Day." Yu Youren was a distinguished calligrapher. Besides cultivating a powerful personal style, he spent decades attempting to standardize the cursive script, which had become increasingly eccentric and difficult to read or learn. Maintaining that the future of a modern nation relies on whether its writing system is easy to use, he and his colleagues in 1936 published the standard cursive forms of the thousand most frequently used characters. They urged practitioners to shun ligatures between adjacent characters and to avoid using varied forms for the same character. The first of three poems reads:

I remember visiting the ponds and pavilions at Xiuchuan [in Yiwu, Zhejiang province].
How melancholy I felt standing by the balustrade in the setting sun!
This old man has traveled ten thousand miles;
The light mist, as before, sends off his lone boat.
Yearning for home, I have missed perch stew for too long;
Spring colors have just returned to the isles of fragrant herbs.
I'll buy a straw cape to fish in the rain;
To whom should I decline in advance [to catch] the seagulls?
Lu Fangweng [Lu You, 1125–1210], "On the Xiuchuan Station"

(trans. by Shi-yee Liu)