Du Fu, China’s Greatest Poet by William Hung?

Question

Okay, I have no idea who this is talking about... this is the part of the poem and the questions that follow. Help!
“Behind the red lacquered gates,
wine is left to sour, meat to rot.
Outside these gates lie bones of
the frozen and the starved.
The flourishing and the withered are
just a foot apart—
It rends my heart to ponder on it.”

(From Du Fu, China’s Greatest Poet by William Hung. Copyright 1952)

Answer the following questions in complete sentences:

1. Who lives “behind the red lacquered gates”?

2. Why might wine be “left to sour” and “meat to rot” within the gates?

3. Who lives outside the gates?

4. How does the poet show his concern for those outside the gates?

Answer 1

The poem is replete with several oriental symbolisms and allusions that it would be inadequate interpretation if only a short section is thus analysed out of proper context. For instance, red, is the color of China and wine is refers to liquor. But both may also connote different aspects/experiences. Secondly, unless one has read keenly and is familiar with the poem, it would be misinformed interpretation to conjencture about specifities concerning who lives behind the gate or how the poet shows his concern about those outside the gates!
I hope you get my reasoning. Perhaps it'd be better to post a web-link to the full text if available.

You may want to peruse through this and get more if you can locate the link:

D. I. Mcmullen

Recollection without Tranquility:
Du Fu, the Imperial Gardens and the State

INTRODUCTION

The famous dictum of Su Shi (1036–1101) that Du Fu
(712–770) “never for the space of a single meal forgot his sovereign”encapsulates a theme that has long been considered central to his poetry.1 Through very different periods in dynastic history and into the modern era, Du Fu’s loyalty to the Tang has provided one reason for his colossal reputation. For centuries, it has conveyed a sense that his priorities were exemplary, and the rare critics who dissented even slightly from this consensus have themselves been criticised.2 Behind this foregrounding of Du Fu’s dedication to state service stretch longer literary and cultural perspectives, relating to the centrality of the dynas- An earlier version of this paper was given to the History Faculty at Peking University on 12
April 2002 and I am grateful for the polite and helpful comments offered on that occasion. I
am grateful also to Professor Lu Yang of Princeton University for allowing me to present an earlier version at New Perspectives on the Tang: An International Conference, on April 20, 2002, at Princeton. I benefited from the comments of the Conference on that occasion. Professor
Paul Kroll went far beyond the normal role of a referee for Asia Major in offering me
detailed and invaluable help on numerous specific points. The anonymous second reader also
provided much helpful advice. In addition, I am grateful to my Cambridge colleague Joe Mc-Dermott and my brother James McMullen of the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, for ideas and for careful help. Finally, I am grateful to Professor Billy So, Chairman of the Department
of History, and Professor Jenny So, Director of the Institute of Chinese Studies, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, for providing me with a haven in which to complete
editing of this article.
1 Quoted by Eva Shan Chou, Reconsidering Du Fu: Literary Greatness and Cultural Context
(Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1995), p. 23. My debt to Professor Chou’s analysis of Du Fu’s
political outlook will be apparent from the following pages.
2 Hu Shi (1891–1962) had criticized Du Fu’s use of regulated verse and had read some
of his verse as light-hearted and colloquial. The onslaught of criticism against Hu in the 1950s
and 1960s included accusation of failure to attribute due seriousness to Du Fu’s antimilitarism,
seen as an aspect of his patriotic love of the people. See for example, Chen Jueren,“Zai chi Hu Shi dui aiguo shiren Du Fu de wumie”, Wenxue
yichan 58 (Guangming ribao June 12, 1955), p. 3. See also the criticism of
Guo Moruo for his attack imputing Du Fu’s sympathy for the people, in Wing-Ming Chan, “Li Po and Tu Fu by Kuo Mo-jo – A Reexamination,” Chinese Literature, Essays, Articles
and Reviews (January 1982), pp. 75–90. Hu Shi’s assertion that Du Fu was not “a Confucian
teacher who pulled a long face all day and spoke only of loyalty to the sovereign and love of tic state in the medieval and early modern literary world. This article,
rather than assessing the strength or consistency of Du Fu’s loyalty or attempting a fresh critical analysis of this aspect of his work, sharpens the focus on one aspect of his attitude to the state. It analyzes in detail his use of a small number of images from nature, as recognizable to the modern as to the ancient world, which were represented in court rites or court institutions that Du Fu knew. It shows the different ways in which, long after in 758 he left the capital, he manipulated these images to express both his criticism of and his commitment to the dynasty.
For the simple and often repeated tag that Du Fu was a loyalist or a patriot is highly reductive. His loyalty was a complex matter: a man of Du Fu’s commitment to art, range of social engagement and powers of recall had copious means to craft his attitudes. His early exclusion from the political center, followed by his inability to hold office as a“close servant” 3 of the emperor for more than the brief period from early summer 757 until mid-758, shaped his perspective on service to the dynasty.
But it was later, when, as he put it, he was “drifting in the south and west between heaven and earth,” that he expressed his outlook most eloquently. As he moved first, in late 759, from the Guanzhong area to Qinzhou in the far northwest and then to Chengdu and places in the Sichuan basin, to go on, in 766, to Kuizhou on the Yangtze, and finally from early 768 through the Yangze gorges to Jiangling and then even further south to beyond the Dongting Lake, he kept a continuous verse record of his feelings. His attitude combined commitment with a sense of rejection, the “gaze to the north” with more immediate and humbler activities. He monitored his receding memories of the capital and of his state service and contrasted them ironically with the reports of destruction in the north and with his experience of illness, ageing and flight in the far southwest.

Part of the conclusion:

Like other great writers whose reputations span centuries, Du Fu is thus to be understood, for all his powers of innovation, as one who wrote at a particular moment in literary history. His commitment to innovate enabled him to build up a corpus of verse distinguished by its “multiplicity,”267 and this article has explored one theme only in it.
Yet that theme, relating as it does to his loyalty, is traditionally a major component in his reputation. His perceived stature as an iconic poet will surely change with time. For the value of loyalty to the ruler or the state, as problematic a value as the modern patriotism with which it is too superficially equated, itself changes in the societies that evaluate their pasts. But moral intensity, exceptionally wide social sympathies, and a commitment to the art of poetry are not combined in any other figure of his period as they are in Du Fu. That unique combination of abilities in the life of a man who experienced the momentous middle decades of the eighth century ensures that the assessment of Chinese tradition will not lightly be set aside.

Source:
Recollection without Tranquility:
Du Fu, the Imperial Gardens and the State
by d. l. mcmullen
.

Answer 2

Most likely,"the red lacquered gates" are the entrance to a wealthy person's house. "The flourishing," those who live in the house, have more food and drink than they need, so much so that some of it goes bad before they get around to using it.

You can figure out the rest.