He loved writing about natural scenes and getting drunk while doing so. Another legend has it that he died drunk, trying to toast the reflection of the moon which he saw reflected in the river. No one in Chinese poetry has written more about the joy of getting drunk, and, in this way, his poems embody the liquor-scented flavor of Tang poetry parties. Unfortunately, the moon does not drink,.
I sing and the moon paces back and forth,. The way the narrator represents the moon and his own shadow as if they were revelers, partying beside him, suggests not only what it feels like when one is drunk, but also a Daoist-inspired sense that the boundaries between the poet and the rest of the world are flexible.
Of course, maybe this is all drunk talk. Rumors persisted centuries after his death that Li Bai died boozing on a boat in the Yangtze. Whether or not these rumors are true, Li Bai managed to always be the life of the party and to transform his bacchanalic poems into philosophical meditations. Wang Wei gets the bronze medal in Tang poetry.
He is always in third place, and, frankly, he often does not get the respect that he deserves. Wang Wei is well known for being the member of the Tang Trinity most influenced by Buddhism. He studied under a Chan Buddhism master for 10 years, and even converted part of his country estate into a monastery.
His poems often involve clear Buddhist metaphors, and the sharp visuals of his imagistic poetry often becomes so realistic that the language calls into question the reality of the tableau, hinting at the evanescence of this world. When you go west out past the Yang Pass, there will be no old friends.
Wang Wei was not only a great poet, but also an excellent painter, and many of his poems, like the one above, have a particularly strong landscape feel. If Du Fu was focused on the historicity of a moment and Li Bai on its spirit, then Wang Wei was focused on the visuals. Most of his paintings are tableaus, laid out like framed scenes. That is certainly true of the above poem, in which he sets a scene where the landscape contrasts so clearly with the parting that is about to occur.
As many of us sit through National Poetry Month in our homes, these three Tang greats can provide the perfect antidote to cabin fever. So, in the spirit of Li Bai, crack open some baijiu , start a Zoom meeting and share some Tang poetry with your closest friends.
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Cite this Item. Read and download Log in through your school or library. Alternate access options. Does lau-yan-bo refer to Lake Dongting? Wuding means "un-fixed" or "shifting" and probably refers to the fact the sands in the desert shift, causing rivers to change course.
Thinking only of their vow that they would crush the Tartars- - On the desert, clad in sable and silk, five thousand of them fell But arisen from their crumbling bones on the banks of the river at the border, Dreams of them enter, like men alive, into rooms where their loves lie sleeping. The above translation was embellished with some "poetic license".
Literally, the words meant: Pledged to sweep the Xiong-nu away without fear for their own safety; Five thousand clad in sable and brocade perished in the dust of Hu; Pity the bones littering the banks of the Wu Ding River, they were the very people dreamt of in ladies' bedchambers. Tang Shi Previous page Next page. But when it came to explaining what the poem actually meant, the fun began. Others explained it was a poem about the beauty of Nature but — and here they would be a little apologetic — as so many elements of the natural world were symbolic in Chinese culture, to a Chinese reader the poem was also packed with denser meanings, hidden to a foreign reader.
It seemed to me that the words offered by the poet were so sparse that the reader could interpret them in many ways. This ancient poem — written almost a thousand years before Shakespeare — offered a kind of space into which the reader could pour his own thoughts and obsessions. The nature-lover, the philosopher, the romantic could all take something different from the poem.
Not only do individual words carry their heavy cargo of symbolism, but also the structure of the poems — how many characters per line; the tone of each character and so on — is strictly determined. The apparent simplicity of the words fit into a scaffolding that is actually quite rigid. And the misguided tendency of some translators to manhandle the Chinese words into an English rhyming scheme can distance us still further from the original.
But even understanding only a fraction of what the poet intended, these Tang poems can be luminous, touching and funny. Try reading this one — Spring Dawn by the influential early Tang poet Meng Haoran where the simple English translation of the original and an attempt to show what the poet means are placed side by side. Find more Tang era poems here. Spring Dawn by Meng Haoran.
I slumbered this spring morning, and missed the dawn, From everywhere I heard the cry of birds. That night the sound of wind and rain had come, Who knows how many petals then had fallen? Like Liked by 1 person. Like Like. Thanks for introducing this poem!
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