c. 704–765
Gao Shi
高適
Read Gao Shi through encouragement at a snowy farewell, solitude on New Year’s Eve, a country view, and a flute that turns melody into landscape.
Gao Shi’s writing includes frontier scenes, but the poems gathered here also attend to recognition, friendship, and the difficulty of being away. His biography in the Old Book of Tang, juan 111 records both literary and official activity and places his death in the first Yongtai year, 765. Those public roles provide context without making every poem an official statement.
Recognition offered and withheld
Farewell to Dong Da begins in wind and snow, then answers the bleak weather with confidence in the friend’s reputation. Notice how the reassurance belongs to a particular act of parting. It is something one person says to another who must travel on.
Set it beside Spring View from a Country Home. Here abundant spring scenery cannot supply an understanding friend. The final drinking persona brings self-mockery and insistence into the same short ending. A cheerful season does not guarantee a contented speaker, just as snow does not prevent encouragement.
Hear distance in a small scene
New Year’s Eve concentrates attention on a cold lamp and a sleepless traveler. The movement toward home happens through imagined thought rather than a journey completed. The coming year also means another year in the body’s aging.
In Hearing a Flute on the Frontier, the question about falling plum blossoms turns a melody into an imagined landscape. Read the note on the tune before deciding that the poem describes real flowers scattered across the passes.
These paths connect farewell, homesickness, and music. Poem pages name the Chinese witnesses used, including the publicly available Gao Changshi ji transcription, and explain the selected wording rather than treating a familiar modern version as the only one.
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