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If you remove the last line of "Autumn Thoughts", does the poem still work?
The pictures would stay, but the person would be gone. The last line says who is looking; without it, the poem reads as one about autumn. Poetry 3.
The Duowenwen team · Updated
The last line of Ma Zhiyuan's "Autumn Thoughts" is 断肠人在天涯: "A heartbroken traveler at the world's edge." This is the third question in the middle school Chinese chain of the question map. The first two covered the juxtaposition of images and the contrast in the middle line.
If you remove the last line, does the poem still work?
The pictures would remain, but the person would be gone. The four lines before it are all scenery, with no "I" anywhere. Only the last line tells you that whoever is looking at all this is someone at the far edge of the world, whose heart is breaking. Take it out, and a reader would think the poem was simply about autumn. Keep it, and every withered, old, dim and lean thing in the poem becomes this person's state of mind. So the last line is the poem's "who is looking". All the scenery before it was put there for its sake.
What if…?
This chain is yours to carry on from here. In a poem you've read, is there another that waits until the last line to tell you who is looking?
Next: type that poem's title into Duowenwen and start with "Why?"