Li Bai and the Moon: the immortal poet of the Tang dynasty
The Moon in the poems of Li Bai, poet of the Tang dynasty: Quiet Night Thoughts, Drinking Alone by Moonlight and the legend of his death in the Yangtze.
No Chinese poet is as closely linked to the Moon as Li Bai, also called Li Po in older Western transcriptions. He lived between 701 and 762, under the Tang dynasty, the golden age of Chinese poetry, and was admired by his contemporaries for the freedom of his inspiration. A senior court official, He Zhizhang, called him an immortal banished from heaven, and that nickname has accompanied him for more than twelve centuries.
A wandering life
Biographical information about Li Bai is partly uncertain. He grew up in the Sichuan region and as a young man travelled widely along the Yangtze, cultivating interests in Taoism, swordsmanship and wine. Around 742 he was summoned to the court of Emperor Xuanzong in Chang'an, but the stay was brief: his independent character was ill suited to palace life, and after a couple of years he took to wandering again.
In 744 he met Du Fu, some ten years younger and destined to be regarded as the other great poet of the age. During the An Lushan rebellion, which convulsed the empire from 755, Li Bai became caught up in the affairs of a rebel prince and was sentenced to exile, then pardoned. He died in 762, probably in what is now Anhui province.
Quiet Night Thoughts
Li Bai's most famous poem, learned by heart by generations of Chinese children, consists of four short lines. The poet sees moonlight before his bed and for a moment mistakes it for frost on the ground. Then, as many translations put it, «I raise my head and see the Moon; I lower it and think of home».
In those few characters lies the core of the Chinese feeling for the Moon. The star unites those who are far apart, because all can see it at the same moment, and so it is the symbol of longing for home and family. This meaning is still alive in the Mid-Autumn Festival, on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, when people contemplate the full Moon and eat the round cakes known as mooncakes.
Drinking Alone by Moonlight
In another series of poems, Drinking Alone by Moonlight, Li Bai finds himself in a garden in bloom with a jug of wine and no friend. So he raises his cup and invites the Moon, and with his own shadow makes a company of three. The Moon cannot drink and the shadow merely follows him, but the poet sings and dances with them, promising to meet them again one day beyond the Milky Way.
This image fed a famous legend. It is said that Li Bai, drunk in a boat, drowned in the Yangtze trying to embrace the Moon's reflection in the water. Historians believe he died of illness, but the legend has endured because it seems to sum up his poetry: the longing to merge with the beauty of nature, to the point of losing oneself in it.
After Li Bai the Moon remained at the heart of Chinese poetry. In 1076, on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival, Su Shi wrote a celebrated lyric dedicated to his distant brother, wishing that they might share the same Moon across a thousand miles. Translated in the West from the late nineteenth century, Li Bai's poems went on to influence European and American poets as well.