The Selected Poems of Li Po

by Li Bai

  Li Po seems to have spent rather little time with his family over the next decade. Instead, he continued to wander eastern China in fine fashion, accompanied by servants and courtesans. Meanwhile, China suffered several major military setbacks, and criticism of the government’s expansionist policies grew. Between 750 and 754, there was an unprecedented series of natural disasters which wreaked havoc upon the common people. Although the government tried to provide disaster relief, it was far from adequate, and popular resentment grew. To make matters worse, the emperor’s obsessions turned from art and government to magic elixirs of immortality and his infamous consort, Yang Kuei-fei. He left the affairs of state to a scheming and dangerous prime minister, Li Lin-fu. One of Li Lin-fu’s many disastrous actions was to replace loyal military governors whom he could not be certain of controlling with illiterate barbarian generals. Soon, the emperor controlled only the palace army directly, while foreign generals with no real loyalty to the T’ang government controlled vast autonomous armies and territories, setting what should have been an all too obvious stage for the catastrophe soon to follow.

  War, Exile, and Later Years (A.D.755-762)

  An Lu-shan was the most powerful of these military governors, controlling all of northeast China. Although most people knew a rebellion was imminent, the self-involved emperor would hear nothing of it, so loyal forces were unprepared to defend the country. In December of 755, An Lu-shan’s forces swept out of the northeast and quickly captured Lo-yang, the eastern capital, where An declared himself emperor of a new dynasty. The following summer, he captured Ch’ang-an. Both cities were sacked brutally, and the devastation elsewhere was staggering.

  Li Po fled to the south with his family and settled in the Hsün-yang area. In 757, Li Po became the presiding poet for a large force led by a certain Prince Lin, who had been sent to lead government resistance in the southeast. Eventually it became clear that the prince’s true intention was to establish an independent regime in the south, and government armies engaged him in Yangchou. His generals quickly abandoned him, as did Li Po, and the prince was soon defeated and executed.

  Li Po made his way back to Hsün-yang, but he was there arrested as a traitor and jailed under sentence of death. Although the imprisonment lasted several months, he was finally exonerated. Not long afterwards, however, a new administration in Hsün-yang took a different view of his involvement with Prince Lin. Li Po, who was seriously ill, suddenly found himself banished to Yeh-lang in the far southwest.

  Li Po was allowed to make the journey into exile at his leisure, and he made the best of it. He traveled up the Yangtze slowly, stopping often to visit friends and relatives. The chronology of Li Po’s exile is vague, but it seems to have lasted about a year and a half. He eventually made the dangerous passage upstream through Three Gorges to K’uei-chou, which the Chinese considered to be on the very outskirts of the civilized world. The nearly impenetrable Wu Mountain complex which surrounded the city was inhabited by aboriginal tribes speaking dialects unintelligible to Han Chinese. Had Li Po left K’uei-chou for Yeh-lang and the malarial southlands, he would have entered a true banishment. Already sick, he would have expected to die there. Fortunately, he was pardoned while staying at K’uei-chou, and he promptly sailed back down the Yangtze to resume his life of wandering, though it was hardly the spontaneous and joyful wandering of his earlier years. Indeed, for the last eight years of his life, beginning with the outbreak of the An Lu-shan rebellion, Li Po wandered more as a sick refugee and exile than a carefree romantic.

  Rebel forces, which had been pushed back into the northeast and seemed all but defeated, dealt government forces several severe defeats and began regaining territory, including Lo-yang. Meanwhile, with the central government foundering, opportunists throughout China began launching local revolts in the attempt to set up independent regimes in their regions, and Li Po had to flee several such revolts in his last years. Throughout this period of fighting, Li Po hoped and petitioned for an administrative position which would allow him to help the government defend itself against the rebels. And yet, in marked contrast to Tu Fu’s work, Li Po’s poetry reveals little concern with the fighting or the tremendous suffering it caused. The fall in census figures from 53 million before the fighting to only 17 million afterwards summarizes the rebellion’s catastrophic impact. Of 53 million people, 36 million were left either dead or displaced and homeless. And although the rebellion itself ended in 763, the T’ang Dynasty never fully recovered from it and the chronic militarism it spawned.

  In 762, a sick Li Po went to visit his “cousin” Li Yang-ping, one of the great T’ang calligraphers. It was the last in a lifetime of journeys. In the end, tzu-jan is the form of loss. Li Po arrived at Li Yang-ping’s home with a confusion of rough drafts which, being desperately ill, he asked Li Yang-ping to edit and preserve. He had managed to keep only a few hundred of the several thousand poems he’d written, and these were in turn soon lost. Another collection, of unknown origin, was discovered and edited by Li Po’s friend, Wei Hao, but it too was lost. Little is known about the history of these texts, or what transformations they underwent, until they were combined in a printed edition hundreds of years later. Meanwhile, poems and manuscripts scattered around the country were collected and edited, and many of them were presumably included in the combined edition, though no one knows how many were actually written by Li Po. Of the several thousand poems he is said to have written, the collection we now have contains only about 1100, and only a portion of these is authentic. So the large majority of Li Po’s work was apparently lost, especially that written during the difficult years of the rebellion. (Had this work survived, Li Po might look a little more politically engaged than he now does.) Combined with the dubious authenticity of so many surviving poems and the lack of biographical information, this loss makes Li Po as much unknown as known, as much legend as history.

  It may be just as well, for the legend Li Po made of himself is more consistent and compelling if he remains, like the moon, an enduring mystery. Whatever actually happened at Li Yang-ping’s house in the winter of 762, Li Po died as the legend says he died: out drunk in a boat, he fell into a river and drowned trying to embrace the moon.

  —D.H.

  EARLY YEARS

  (A.D. 701-742)

  GOING TO VISIT TAI-T’IEN MOUNTAIN’S MASTER OF THE WAY WITHOUT FINDING HIM

  A dog barks among the sounds of water.

  Dew stains peach blossoms. In forests,

  I sight a few deer, then at the creek,

  hear nothing of midday temple bells.

  Wild bamboo parts blue haze. A stream

  hangs in flight beneath emerald peaks.

  No one knows where you’ve gone. Still,

  for rest, I’ve found two or three pines.

  O-MEI MOUNTAIN MOON

  O-mei Mountain moon half-full in autumn. Tonight,

  its light filling the P’ing-ch’iang River current,

  I leave Ch’ing-ch’i for Three Gorges. Thinking of you

  without seeing you, I pass downstream of Yü-chou.

  AT CHING-MEN FERRY, A FAREWELL

  Crossing into distances beyond Ching-men,

  I set out through ancient southlands. Here,

  mountains fall away into wide-open plains,

  and the river flows into boundless space.

  The moon setting, heaven’s mirror in flight,

  clouds build, spreading to seascape towers.

  Poor waters of home. I know how it feels:

  ten thousand miles of farewell on this boat.

  GAZING AT THE LU MOUNTAIN WATERFALL

  1

  Climbing west toward Incense-Burner Peak,

  I look south and see a falls of water, a cascade

  hanging there, three thousand feet high,

  then seething dozens of miles down canyons.

  Sudden as lightning breaking into flight,

  its white rainbow of mystery appears. Afraid

 
at first the celestial Star River is falling,

  splitting and dissolving into cloud heavens,

  I look up into force churning in strength,

  all power, the very workings of Creation.

  It keeps ocean winds blowing ceaselessly,

  shines a mountain moon back into empty space,

  empty space it tumbles and sprays through,

  rinsing green cliffs clean on both sides,

  sending pearls in flight scattering into mist

  and whitewater seething down towering rock.

  Here, after wandering among these renowned

  mountains, the heart grows rich with repose.

  Why talk of cleansing elixirs of immortality?

  Here, the world’s dust rinsed from my face,

  I’ll stay close to what I’ve always loved,

  content to leave that peopled world forever.

  2

  Sunlight on Incense-Burner kindles violet smoke.

  Watching the distant falls hang there, river

  headwaters plummeting three thousand feet in flight,

  I see Star River falling through nine heavens.

  VISITING A CH’AN MASTER AMONG MOUNTAINS AND LAKES

  Like Hüi-yuan fostering Ling-yün,

  you open the gates of Ch’an for me:

  here beneath rock and pine, serene,

  it’s no different than Glacier Peak.

  Blossoms pure, no dye of illusion,

  mind and water both pure idleness,

  I sit once and plumb whole kalpas,

  see through heaven and earth empty.

  NIGHT THOUGHTS AT TUNG-LIN MONASTERY ON LU MOUNTAIN

  Alone, searching for blue-lotus roofs,

  I set out from city gates. Soon, frost

  clear, Tung-lin temple bells call out,

  Hu Creek’s moon bright in pale water.

  Heaven’s fragrance everywhere pure

  emptiness, heaven’s music endless,

  I sit silent. It’s still, the entire Buddha-

  realm in a hair’s-breadth, mind-depths

  all bottomless clarity, in which vast

  kalpas begin and end out of nowhere.

  SUNFLIGHT CHANT

  Sun rises over its eastern harbor

  as if coming from some underworld,

  and crossing heaven, returns again to western seas,

  nowhere its six sun-dragons could ever find rest.

  It’s kept up this daily beginning and ending forever,

  but we’re not made of such ancestral ch’i,

  so how long can we wander with it here?

  Flowers bloom in spring wind. They never refuse.

  And trees never resent leaf-fall in autumn skies.

  No one could whip the turning seasons along so fast:

  the ten thousand things rise and fall of themselves.

  Hsi Ho, O great

  Sun Mother, Sun Guide— how could you drown

  in those wild sea-swells of abandon?

  And Lu Yang, by what power

  halted evening’s setting sun?

  It defies Tao, offends heaven—

  all fake and never-ending sham.

  I’ll toss this Mighty Mudball earth into a bag

  and break free into that boundless birthchamber of it all!

  WRITTEN ON A WALL AT SUMMIT-TOP TEMPLE

  Staying the night at Summit-Top Temple,

  you can reach out and touch the stars.

  I venture no more than a low whisper,

  afraid I’ll wake the people of heaven.

  CH’ANG-KAN VILLAGE SONG

  These bangs not yet reaching my eyes,

  I played at our gate, picking flowers,

  and you came on your horse of bamboo,

  circling the well, tossing green plums.

  We lived together here in Ch’ang-kan,

  two little people without suspicions.

  At fourteen, when I became your wife,

  so timid and betrayed I never smiled,

  I faced wall and shadow, eyes downcast.

  A thousand pleas: I ignored them all.

  At fifteen, my scowl began to soften.

  I wanted us mingled as dust and ash,

  and you always stood fast here for me,

  no tower vigils awaiting your return.

  At sixteen, you sailed far off to distant

  Yen-yü Rock in Ch’ü-t’ang Gorge, fierce

  June waters impossible, and howling

  gibbons called out into the heavens.

  At our gate, where you lingered long,

  moss buried your tracks one by one,

  deep green moss I can’t sweep away.

  And autumn’s come early. Leaves fall.

  It’s September now. Butterflies appear

  in the west garden. They fly in pairs,

  and it hurts. I sit heart-stricken

  at the bloom of youth in my old face.

  Before you start back from out beyond

  all those gorges, send a letter home.

  I’m not saying I’d go far to meet you,

  no further than Ch’ang-feng Sands.

  FAREWELL TO A VISITOR RETURNING EAST

  Autumn rains ending in this river town,

  and wine gone, your lone sail soars away.

  Setting out across billows and waves, your

  family settles back for the journey home

  past islands lavish with blossoms ablaze,

  willow filigree crowding in over the banks.

  And after you’re gone, nothing left to do,

  I go back and sweep off the fishing pier.

  ON YELLOW-CRANE TOWER, FAREWELL TO MENG HAO-JAN WHO’S LEAVING FOR YANG-CHOU

  From Yellow-Crane Tower, my old friend leaves the west.

  Downstream to Yang-chou, late spring a haze of blossoms,

  distant glints of lone sail vanish into emerald-green air:

  nothing left but a river flowing on the borders of heaven.

  TO SEND FAR AWAY

  So much beauty home— flowers filled the house.

  So much beauty gone— nothing but this empty bed,

  your embroidered quilt rolled up, never used.

  It’s been three years. Your scent still lingers,

  your scent gone and yet never ending.

  But now you’re gone, never to return,

  thoughts of you yellow leaves falling,

  white dew glistening on green moss.

  HSIANG-YANG SONGS

  1

  In Hsiang-yang, pleasures abound. They play

  Copper-Blond Horses, and we sing and dance.

  But it’s a river town. Return to clear water,

  and a blossoming moon bares our delusions.

  2

  Hsien Mountain rises above emerald Han River

  waters and snow-white sand. On top, inscribed

  to life’s empty vanishing, a monument stands,

  long since blotted out beneath green moss.

  SOMETHING SAID, WAKING DRUNK ON A SPRING DAY

  It’s like boundless dream here in this

  world, nothing anywhere to trouble us.

  I have, therefore, been drunk all day,

  a shambles of sleep on the front porch.

  Coming to, I look into the courtyard.

  There’s a bird among blossoms calling,

  and when I ask what season this is,

  an oriole’s voice drifts on spring winds.

  Overcome, verging on sorrow and lament,

  I pour another drink. Soon, awaiting

  this bright moon, I’m chanting a song.

  And now it’s over, I’ve forgotten why.

  AT YÜAN TAN-CH’IU’S MOUNTAIN HOME

  By nature, my old friend on East Mountain

  treasures the beauty of hills and valleys.

  Spring now green, you lie in empty woods,

  still sound asleep under a midday sun,

  your robes growing lucid in pine winds, />
  rocky streams rinsing ear and heart clean.

  No noise, no confusion— all I want is

  this life pillowed high in emerald mist.

  TO SEND FAR AWAY

  1

  A woman alone here east of Ch’ung-ling

  while you stay among Han River islands,

  I look out across bright blossoms all day:

  a lit path of white stretching between us.

  We made clouds-and-rain love our farewell,

  then nothing but autumn grasses remained,

  autumn grasses and autumn moths rising,

  and thoughts of you all twilight sorrow.

  Will I ever see you again, ever darken

  this lamp as you loosen my gauze robes?

  2

  Short and tall, spring grasses lavish

  our gate with green, as if passion-driven,

  everything returned from death to life.

  My burr-weed heart— it alone is bitter.

  You’ll know that in these things I see

  you here again, planting our gardens