Drinking Alone beneath the Moon

A made company

He is alone and imagines company. The moon is invited. The shadow, which is only his own outline, becomes the third person. The arithmetic is the joke and the consolation. 無相親 is “no one intimate with me.” The gloss keeps 相親 together as close companionship.

Moon and shadow

既不解飲: the moon, since it does not know how to drink. 徒 is “in vain, only.” The shadow can follow and cannot answer. He keeps them anyway. 將 in 月將影 is the classical “and,” jiāng, not the verb “to take.” 暫 limits the whole arrangement to now.

行樂 is “to take one’s pleasure,” xíng lè, not the yuè of music. Spring is the deadline. The flowers in the first line already said the season.

Song, dance, and the end of the party

徘徊 is one word, to pace and linger. The gloss keeps this compound together. When he sings, the moon drifts. When he dances, the shadow breaks up. Sober, the three share the hour. Drunk, each goes off. That includes the moon and the shadow, which were never going to stay.

無情遊 and the River of Stars

無情 is not “cruel.” The moon and the shadow have no human feelings. The bond he proposes is a roaming outside ordinary attachment, 遊. 相期 is to set a meeting. 雲漢 is the Milky Way, the River of Stars. 漢 is the same word as the river name and the dynasty name. Here it is the sky.

酒 is fermented grain wine, the drink of a Tang poem. It is not a note about modern liquor. The wine page stays with that literary occasion.

The Quan Tang shi tradition records other openings (flowers below, flowers in front) and 明月影 for 月將影. We keep the reading in which “and” is explicit, and mention the variants so they are not a surprise in another edition.

This is the first of four poems titled 月下獨酌. It is a five-character ancient-style poem, not a jueju and not a lüshi. Fourteen lines, no required parallelism, and a change of rhyme.

The first eight lines rhyme on 親, 人, 身, and 春, level-tone words in the 真 group. The later section changes the rhyme, bringing together 亂, 歡, 散, and 漢; this includes the level-tone 歡 rather than an uninterrupted series of departing-tone endings. A shift like that is ordinary in ancient-style verse and is one reason the poem is not regulated. Yuefu, the older music-bureau song, is a neighbor of this freedom. It is named on the forms index. This poem is not itself given a yuefu title.

We do not print a level-and-oblique grid. The form is not asking for one. Mandarin pinyin, including the sandhi on 一壺 (yì before a rising tone), is only a way to read the line aloud.

Li Bai builds a small society out of what is already in the garden: wine, moonlight, his own shadow. The performance is large, and the company is invented. That is different work from Quiet Night Thought, where the moon sends him back to a hometown. Both poems are on the moon shelf. They do not say the same thing.

The story that he died trying to embrace the moon in the water is a later legend. It is not an event in this poem, and it should not be used as the poem’s ending. He asks for another meeting in the River of Stars. That is a figure, written while he is still in the flowers.

Su Shi’s mid-autumn lyric is the Song poem that inherits this gesture: wine, a question put to the sky, and someone far away. Li Bai’s someone, tonight, is the moon itself. The dynasty is Tang.