"But no news of relatives or friends reached me" didn't get any help in spirit and material aspects; "I'm sick and old, and I'm alone in the boat." The poet has been "sick and old" since he took his wife and children to Kuizhou and took a boat out of the gorge in the first month of the third year of Dali. He roamed Hunan, took the boat as his home and had a bright future. Facing the vastness of Wang Yang in Dongting Lake, he felt more lonely and dangerous. Self-narration is so lonely that it contains infinite affection in the sudden change and contrast of the extremely stuffy poetic realm.