This five-character poem was written one year before the poet's death, that is, the third year of Tang Daizong Dali (768). In the winter of the third year of Dali, Du Fu drifted all the way from Jiangling and Gongan to Yueyang and boarded the Yueyang Tower, which he had been longing for for for a long time. Facing the vast and magnificent Dongting Lake, the poet sincerely admired it. Then I feel sad when I think that I am still wandering outside in my later years and the country is troubled. Generally speaking, the grandeur of mountains and rivers is quite different from the grandeur of the poet's mind, so he is sad but not depressed, depressed but not depressed.
Yueyang Tower in the West Gate of Yueyang City, Hunan Province is one of the four famous buildings in China (the other three are Yellow Crane Tower in Wuhan, Tengwangge and Stork Tower in Nanchang, and the last one is said to be Penglai Pavilion and Yuewanglou). In the fourth year of Tang Kaiyuan, Zhang Shuo, secretary of the Secretariat of the Central Committee, worked in this state and often went to the building with talented people to compose poems, which made it famous and became a world-famous cultural building.