701–762
Li Bai
李白
Read Li Bai through homesickness, mountain solitude, a waterfall, and two sides of a farewell: annotated Chinese poems with original English translations.
Li Bai is the Tang poet English readers meet first, often under an older spelling, Li Po, or the pinyin Li Bo. The name in the poems is 李白. His courtesy name is Taibai, 太白, and one of his styles is Qinglian jushi, the Householder of the Azure Lotus. The dates usually given are 701–762.
He grew up in the Sichuan region and left home in his twenties. He spent years traveling, looking for patrons, writing poems that make the traveling look like a destiny. In the early 740s he was at the court of the emperor Xuanzong. The elder poet He Zhizhang is said to have called him a banished immortal, 謫仙人. The stay at court did not last. He was given a title and a salary and no real office, and he left.
During the An Lushan rebellion he joined the staff of Prince Yong, a son of the emperor who was raising troops. After the prince’s failure, Li Bai was sentenced to exile at Yelang, in the southwest. He was pardoned before he arrived. He died in 762 at Dangtu, on the Yangzi. The story that he drowned trying to embrace the moon is a later legend. It is part of how people wanted his death to look. It is not a fact to hang a poem on.
How the poems behave
He is not a modest observer. The voice is large, and it knows it is performing. That is easy to turn into a costume: the drunk genius, the man who will not serve. The poems are more precise than the costume. Quiet Night Thought is twenty syllables and a lowered head. Drinking Alone beneath the Moon invents two companions and then admits they cannot drink. The same poet can be almost anonymous and wildly social in the space of a few pages.
Set him beside Du Fu, who was younger and who lived further into the rebellion’s wreckage. Later criticism made them a pair, Li Bai the untrammeled one and Du Fu the poet of history. The pairing is useful if it sends you back to the poems, and useless if it replaces them. Du Fu’s Spring View is what a regulated eight-line poem can hold of a fallen capital. Li Bai’s quatrain does not try.
A friend going downstream
Yellow Crane Tower Farewell gives us a third scale of attention. The friend is Meng Haoran, departing toward Yangzhou. A season and destination lead into a small sail, then the sail disappears while the river stays in view. The feeling comes through the act of continuing to watch.
Our poem page follows the received reading with 碧山, blue-green mountains, and explains the widely remembered 碧空, blue sky, as a recorded variant. That choice matters to the translation’s visible landscape. It does not change the poem into a different farewell.
Read it beside Wang Wei’s Sending Yuan Er to Anxi: one poet speaks before a departure, while the other follows it with his eyes. Then read Meng Haoran’s own Spring Dawn, where attention ends at a question about flowers.
Leaving, staying, and changing scale
In To Wang Lun, Li Bai takes the departing person’s place. A song reaches him from shore just as he is ready to go. Compare the sound that interrupts his departure with the sail he keeps watching in Yellow Crane Tower Farewell. The point of view changes what the poem can notice.
Sitting Alone on Jingting Mountain removes birds and a cloud until only the speaker and mountain remain. It makes company through a mutual gaze. Viewing the Waterfall at Mount Lu goes the other way in scale: a stream seen from a distance becomes the River of Stars falling from heaven. One poem holds attention still; the other enlarges a visible movement almost beyond belief.
Where to go from here
The two moon poems disagree about what the moon can do: one turns toward home; the other invents company around a cup of wine. The farewell adds a real companion who is leaving. Together these readings make a more varied introduction than a single portrait of the wandering poet.
The quatrains belong on the jueju shelf, with the caveat that Quiet Night Thought is ancient-style in its tones. Drinking Alone beneath the Moon is gushi. These poems come from the Tang, but their shared period does not give them a single voice.
If the pages themselves are new, start with How to read classical Chinese poetry. The four lines of Quiet Night Thought are the example.
Follow the river, then listen to the city
Leaving White Emperor City at Dawn makes a long river passage seem almost instantaneous. Crossing Jingmen opens mountain country into a plain, then imagines the water of home accompanying the boat. These are different kinds of movement: one takes pleasure in speed, the other notices how a landscape can remain a companion while changing around the traveler.
Hearing a Flute in Luoyang moves through sound instead. The musician remains unseen while the tune fills the city and calls home to mind. Set that homesickness beside A Traveler’s Song, where good hospitality briefly makes the distinction between home and elsewhere fall away. Being a traveler does not produce the same response in every poem.
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