University of Virginia Library

INTRODUCTION

I

At the early dawn of medieval Europe China had
reached the noontide of her civilization. Indeed, the
three hundred years of the Tang dynasty beginning with
the seventh century witnessed a most brilliant era of
culture and refinement, unsurpassed in all the annals
of the Middle Kingdom. And the greatest of all the
artistic attainments of this period was in literature, and
particularly in poetry. There were no dramatists; no
romancers; but only poets—and poets there were galore.

"In this age," remarks a native critic, "whoever was
a man, was a poet." And this is not satire. The
"Anthology of the Tang Dynasty" consists of nine hundred
Books and contains more than forty-eight thousand
nine hundred poems by no less than two thousand
three hundred poets. Moreover, since this collection
was compiled as late as the eighteenth century by order
of a Manchu emperor, it represents only a meager crop
from a field that had suffered the ruthless ravages of
time for fully a thousand years. Imagine, then, the
vast efflorescence of what must have been veritably a
tropic jungle of poesy!

Now a person may consider it no distinction to be
counted one among these poets when the list is so large;
but to be picked out as the greatest of them all—as the
leader of this colossal army of immortals, is certainly
a singular distinction and honor. And this honor falls

to Li Po. He, by almost unanimous consent, is regarded
as the greatest poet under the Tangs, and of
China of all times. "He is the lofty peak of Tai," proclaims
an admirer, "towering above ten thousand mountains
and hills; he is the sun in whose presence a million
stars of heaven lose their scintillating splendor."

Before attempting to follow the poet's career in detail,
let us take a glance at China as it was under the
Tang dynasty, especially under the famous emperor
Hsuan Tsung, who was one time patron to Li Po, and
whose long and illustrious reign, ending with his tragic
fall, marks the golden age of Chinese poetry.

II

The Tangs came to power in the early decades of the
seventh century when Mahomet was just starting out on
his first campaigns. Tai Tsung, the second emperor
of the dynasty, in the twenty-three years of his reign
(627-650) consolidated the hostile sections of the
country and laid a firm foundation for his empire,
which he greatly expanded by conquering Tibet and subduing
the Tartar tribes of the Mongolian desert. Wu
Hu—an empress (684-704)—has been much maligned
for usurping the male prerogative of sovereignty; but
she was undoubtedly one of China's ablest rulers and did
more than uphold the prestige of her land during the
last quarter of the century. Then followed shortly
Hsuan Tsung, who ascended the dragon throne in 713
and ruled for forty-two years.

It was an age of great political power for China.
Her suzeraignty extended from Siberia to the Himalaya
mountain range, and from Korea to the Caspian Sea.

Tributes were paid by India and Tonkin. The Caliphs
of Medina sent precious stones, horses, and spice. From
the Japanese capital, Nara, came envoys and students
at frequent intervals, while once, in 643, from far
Greece Emperor Theodosius despatched a mission to
the court of Cathay.

It was an age of prosperity. The fertile valleys of
the Yellow River and the Yangtze-kiang were turned
into fields of rice, barley and waving corn, amid gleaming
streams and lakes. Peace reigned in China proper
—the vast domain that had once been torn up and made
desolate by internecine wars during the four centuries
of the Three Kingdoms and the Six Dynasties. Even
in the remotest rural district, the wine-pennant, a tavern
sign, was seen flying on the roadside, denoting the presence
of tranquility and good cheer, while large cities
like Lo-yang (i.e. Honan-fu, Honan) and Chin-ling
(i. e. Nanking, Kiansu) flourished immensely with increasing
trade and travel.

Chang-an, the present city of Hsian-fu in Shensi, was
the capital and the wonder of the age. The city was
never so rich, splendid, and spendthrift. "See ye,"
proudly sings a poet, "the splendor of the imperial
abode, and know the majesty of the Son of Heaven!"
Beside the main castle with its nine-fold gates, there
were thirty-six imperial palaces that reared over the
city their resplendent towers and pillars of gold, while
innumerable mansions and villas of noblemen vied with
one another in magnificence. By day the broad avenues
were thronged with motley crowds of townfolk,
gallants on horseback, and mandarin cars drawn by
yokes of black oxen. And there were countless houses
of pleasure, which opened their doors by night, and

which abounded in song, dance, wine and pretty women
with faces like the moon.

It was also an age of religious proselytism. Buddhism
had been in China for centuries before the Tang
dynasty, and the country was dotted with monasteries
and pagodas. It was in the reign of Tai Tsung that
Yuen Tsang, a Buddhist priest, made his famous pilgrimage
to India and brought back several hundred volumes
of Sanscrit sutras. While Confucianism remained ostensibly
the guiding principle of state and social morality,
Taoism had gathered a rich incrustation of mythology
and superstition and was fast winning a following
of both the court and the common people. Laotzu,
the founder of the religion, was claimed by the reigning
dynasty as its remote progenitor and was honored
with an imperial title. In 636 the Nestorian missionaries
were allowed to settle in Chang-an and erect their
church. They were followed by Zoroastrians, and even
Saracens who entered the Chinese capital with their
sword in sheath.

Thus Chang-an became not only the center of religious
proselytism, but also a great cosmopolitan city where
Syrians, Arabs, Persians, Tartars, Tibetans, Koreans,
Japanese and Tonkinese and other peoples of widely
divergent races and faiths lived side by side, presenting
a remarkable contrast to the ferocious religious and
racial strife then prevailing in Europe. Again, in
Chang-an there were colleges of various grades, beside
special institutes for caligraphy, arithmetic and music.
Astronomy was encouraged by Tai Tsung, who also
filled the imperial library with more than two hundred
thousand books. Hsuan Tsung saw to it that there was

a school in every village in the fifteen provinces of his
empire.

Hsuan Tsung himself was regarded as a perfect prince,
wise and valiant, a sportsman accomplished in all
knightly exercises and a master of all elegant arts.
Being a musician, he established in his palace an
operatic school, called the "Pear Garden," at which
both male and female actors were trained, and in which
historians find the prototype of the modern Chinese
drama. The emperor surrounded himself with a brilliant
court of poets, artists, and beautiful women. Odes
were offered him by Li Po and Tu Fu; Li Kuei-nien sang
at his bidding, while Yang Kuei-fei, the loveliest of the
three thousand palace ladies, ever accompanied his
palanquin. Although in his latter years he indulged in
all sorts of extravagant revelry, he was never vulgar.
It is fitting that he is still remembered by the name
of Ming Huang—the "Illustrious Sovereign."

But in order to complete the picture of this era there
is a darker side, which really brought into full play
the spiritual energies of the Chinese race. Within, the
court, from the very beginning of the dynasty, was upset
more than once by the bloody intrigues of princes and
princesses who coveted the imperial crown. Without,
China had her Vandals and Goths and Franks, to whom
her wealth and splendor offered irresistible temptation
to pillage. The border warfare never ceased, and not
without many a serious reverse for the imperial forces,
which made forays in retaliation, often far into the
hostile territories, losing their men by thousands. Tai
Tsung's Korean expedition was nothing but a gigantic
fiasco, and the conquest of that peninsula was completed

by generals of the Empress, Wu Hu. But in her reign
the Kitans, a redoubtable foe, appeared on the northern
border. In the west the restive and warlike Tibetans
could not be wholly pacified by political marriages,
in which the imperial princesses were bestowed on the
barbarian chieftains from time to time. The armies of
Hsuan Tsung were most unfortunate. In 751 thirty
thousand men perished in the desert of Gobi; while in
the campaigns in Yunnan against the southern barbarians
the Chinese lost, it is said, two hundred thousand
men. Finally came the rebellion of An Lu-shan, which
like a storm swept the mid-imperial plains, drenched
them in blood, and left the empire tottering on the brink
of ruin.

An Lu-shan was a soldier of the Kitan race, who distinguished
himself in fighting against his own tribes,
and who won the favor of Yang Kuei-fei and the confidence
of Hsuan Tsung. His promotion was rapid. He
was ennobled as a duke, and made the governor of the
border provinces of the north, where he held under command
the best armies of the empire and nursed an inordinate
ambition, biding his time. Meanwhile at the
court, the blind love of Hsuan Tsung for Yang Kuei-fei
was corrupting the government. Her brother Yang
Kuo-chung was appointed prime-minister, while eunuchs
held high offices of state. At last in the spring of
755, An Lu-shan, under the pretext of ridding the court
of Yang Kuo-chung, raised the standard of rebellion.
He quickly captured the city of Lo-yang, occupied the
entire territory north of the Yellow River, comprising
the provinces of Shansi and Chili, and was soon marching
eastward on Chang-an. He had proclaimed himself
the Emperor of the Great Yen dynasty.

"Is it possible!" exclaimed Hsuan Tsung, now an
aged monarch, in amazement at the ingratitude of his
vassal and at the impending catastrophe. The defense
at the Pass of Tung Kwan collapsed. The emperor
was forced to flee from the capital one rainy morning,
with his favorite mistress and a handful of his faithful
servants. The soldiers escorting Hsuan Tsung blamed
Yang Kuo-chung for the disaster, and he and all his
kin were massacred. Yang Kuei-fei herself did not escape.
She was ruthlessly snatched from the arms of
her imperial lover, and was strangled and buried on
the roadside without ceremony. The emperor abdicated
in favor of his son, and proceeded mournfully to
Ssuchuan, the land of Shuh.

The new emperor, Su Tsung, mustered a strong army
under General Kuo Tsu-i to oppose the foes. Confusion
was added by the revolt of Prince Ling, the sixteenth
son of Hsuan Tsung, who challenged the authority of
his brother from his stronghold in the southern provinces,
though this uprising was promptly suppressed.
An Lu-shan was driven from Chang-an in 757, and was
shortly murdered by his own son, who was in turn killed
by An Lu-shan's general, Shi Ssu-ming, another Kitan
Tartar, who assumed the imperial title and retained the
northern provinces in his iron grip. But Shi Ssu-ming
himself was soon assassinated by his son, and the rebellion
came finally to an end in 762. We need not
follow the history longer. In that very year the former
emperor, Hsuan Tsung, who had returned from exile
to a lonely palace in Chang-an, died, broken-hearted.

Such was the era. It had, on the one hand, internal
peace, prosperity, cosmopolitan culture, profuse hospitalities
and literary patronage; on the other, distant

wars, court intrigues and, finally, the national catastrophe
with its tragic drama of stupendous magnitude,
that brought forth Li Po and his race of poets, kindled
their imagination, and touched their heart-strings to immortal
song.

III

The ancestry of Li Po is traced back through the
obscurity of many generations to Li Kao of the fifth
century, who ruled the Liang State, or the western portion
of what is now the province of Kansu. The family
dwelt in exile for a period in the Mongolian desert land.
The poet himself writes of his being "Originally a cotten-clothed
of Lunhsi." That is to say, he was a plain
citizen of a district in Kansu. But he was born, according
to best authorities, in the adjoining land of
Shuh, or the present Ssuchuan—that picturesque western
province of mountains and tumbling waters which
flow into the great Yangtze-kiang.

As to the year of his birth, biographers again differ.
Some maintain it to have been as early as 699, while
others would have it as late as 705, with consequent
variation in his age, since he died, as all agree, in the
year 762. A biographical calendar, compiled by Sieh
Chung-yung of the Sung dynasty, places the poet's birth
in the second year of the Shen-lung era; while another
calendar by Wang-chi of the Ming dynasty, who edited
the complete works of Li Po, fixes the year as the first
of the Chang-an era. All evidence seems to favor the
latter date, which falls in the year of 701.

On the night of the poet's birth his mother dreamed
of the planet of Chang-keng, which is Venus, and which
is popularly known in China as the Tai-po Hsing,

meaning literally the Great White Star. Thus it was
that he was named Po (the White One), and surnamed
Tai-po (the Great White One). Later he dubbed himself
the Green Lotus Man, borrowing the name from
a Buddhist saint; and sometimes went by the self-evident
designation of the "Old Wine Genius."

When a boy of six Li Po could read, and by the age
of ten he had mastered the Confucian books of the Odes
and the History and miscellaneous classics by a hundred
writers, and was composing poems of his own. While
he was still in his teens, he retired with a recluse by the
name of Tunyen-tzu to the mountain of Min in northern
Ssuchuan. Here the two men kept strange birds
as pets and succeeded in taming them to feed from their
hands, the report of which brought to their hermitage
the local magistrate, who invited them to enter the
government service. But they declined. Our young
poet sang contentedly:

In 721 he traveled down the Yangtze to Yun-meng,
the land of seven moors, that lies to the north of the river
and the Tung-ting Lake; here he was married to a granddaughter
of a certain ex-minister Hsu, and stayed there
for three years.

Then he moved up north to Shantung, and made his
home in Jen-cheng and elsewhere. "I am thirty," he
wrote to a friend, "I make verses without tiring, while
in front of my house carts and horses go by." Years
passed without any visible achievement. One cannot
blame too harshly his first wife who, impatient of the
lack of his promotion, left him with the children. It

was during this period that he became one of the "Six
Idlers of the Bamboo Valley" who gathered in the mountain
of Chu-lai for the jolly fellowship of wine and
song. He traveled extensively, too. Once he was in
the city of Lo-yang, enjoying the lavish hospitality of
Tung Tsas-chiu, who had a special wine house built for
the poet at the Tien-tsin bridge-head, where
Later the same host invited the poet to Ping-chou near
Taiyuan-fu in Shansi, where Tung's father was stationed
as the military commander. Here the two companions
went on happy excursions, taking singing-girls out on
the river by the dynastic shrine of Chin. It was in
Ping-chou that the poet befriended Kuo Tsu-i, who was
still a young soldier in the ranks, but who was later to
become the savior of the empire as well as of the poet's
life. In the year 738 Li Po was back in Shantung when
Tu Fu, his one great and formidable rival in poetic
fame, arrived in the province and met him. At once
a warm friendship and exchange of poems began that
lasted lifelong, and that makes the happiest and most
memorable chapter in China's literary history. Tu Fu
was the younger of the two. They slept together under
one coverlet (so he tells us in one of his poems), and
went hand in hand like two brothers.[2]

Li Po traveled south to the lands of Wu and Yueh
of old to wander amid the ruins of once glorious palaces
and among the lakes of lotus lilies, and chose to

sojourn in a district called Yen, in Chehkiang, famous
for the beauty of its hills and valleys. Here he met Wu
Yun, scholar and Taoist, who on being summoned to
court took Li Po with him to Chang-an, the capital of
the empire.

It was about the year 742 that Li Po entered Chang-an,
the golden metropolis, when the long prosperous years
of the Tien-pao era had just begun, and the court of
Hsuan Tsung had reached the pinacle of brilliance.
Li Po went to see Ho Chi-chang, a guest of the crown
prince, and showed his poems. The jovial courtier was
so pleased that he bartered his gold ornament for wine
and entertained the new-comer. Moreover, he commended
the poet to the emperor. "I have in my house,"
he said, "probably the greatest poet that ever existed.
I have not dared to speak of him to your Majesty because
of his one defect, which is rather difficult to correct:
he drinks, and drinks sometimes to excess. But
his poems are beautiful. Judge them for yourself,
sire!" So saying, he thrust in Hsuan Tsung's hand a
bundle of manuscript. "Fetch me the author of these
poems!" spoke the emperor instantly—so runs one story.

But according to other versions it was Wu Yun, or
Princess Yu-chen, who introduced Li Po to the court.
At any rate, the poet was given an audience in the Hall
of Gold Bells. His discourse and ode at once won the
admiration of the emperor, so that he feasted the poet
at the Table of the Seven Jewels and assigned him to
the Han-ling Academy. That is, Li Po was placed under
imperial patronage, without any special duties but
to write occasional poems, of which the ninth piece in
the present book is an example.

He banqueted with lords and ladies in and out of the

court, and sought frequently the taverns of the city.
But who were his boon companions? A vivid portrayal
of that much celebrated company, the "Eight Immortals
of the Wine-cup," whose revels were the talk of
Chang-an, is happily preserved for us in an equally celebrated
poem by Tu Fu.

One day in spring Hsuan Tsung with Lady Yang
Kuei-fei held a royal feast in the Pavilion of Aloes.
The tree-peonies of the garden, newly imported from
India, were in full flower as if in rivalry of beauty with
the emperor's voluptuous mistress. There were the musicians
of the Pear Garden and the wine of grapes
from Hsi-liang. Li Po was summoned, for only his
art could capture for eternity the glory of the vanishing
hours. But when brought to the imperial presence,
the poet was drunk. Court attendants threw cold water
on his face and handed him a writing brush. Whereupon
he improvised those three beautiful songs[3] in rapturous
praise of Yang Kuei-fei, which were sung by the
famous vocalist, Li Kuei-nien, while the emperor himself
played the tune on a flute of jade.

But it was one of these very songs,[4] according to a
widely accepted tradition, that helped cut short the gay

and prodigal career of the poet at the court. Kao Li-shih,
the powerful eunuch, who had been greatly humiliated
by having been ordered to pull off Li Po's shoes
once as the latter became drunk at the palace, persuaded
Yang Kuei-fei that the poet had intended a malicious
satire in his poem by comparing her with Lady
Flying Swallow, who was a famous court beauty of the
Han dynasty, but who was unfaithful and never attained
the rank of empress. This was enough to turn gratitude
to venomous hate, and Yang Kuei-fei interfered whenever
the emperor sought to appoint the poet to office.
There is another tradition that Li Po incurred the displeasure
of Hsuan Tsung through the intrigue of a
fellow courtier. This story is also plausible. Li Po
was not the sort of man fitted for the highly artificial
life of the court, where extreme urbanity, tact and dissimulation,
were essential to success. He soon expressed
a desire to return to the mountains; and the
emperor presented him with a purse and allowed him to
depart. He was then forty-five years old, and had sojourned
in the capital for three years.

Once more Li Po took to the roads. He wandered
about the country for ten years, "now sailing one thousand
li in a day, now tarrying a whole year at a place,
enjoying the beauty thereof." He went up northeast
to Chinan-fu of Shantung to receive the Taoist diploma
from the "high heavenly priest of Pei-hai." He journeyed
south and met Tsui Tsung-chi, the handsome Immortal
of the Wine-cup, who had been banished from
the capitol and was an official at the city of Nanking.
The old friendship was renewed, and withal the glad
old time. It is related that one moonlight night they
took a river journey down the Yangtze from Tsai-hsi

to Nanking, during which Li Po arrayed himself in
palace robes and sat in the boat, laughing aloud, and
rolling his frenzied eyes. Was it the laughter of wanton
revelry, or of self-derision, or of haughty scorn at the
foolish world that could not fathom his soul? In 754
Wei Hao, a young friend of his, came to meet him at
Kuang-ling, Kiangsu Province, and traveled with him
a while. To him Li Po entrusted a bundle of his
poems, saying, "Pray remember your old man! Surely
in the future I'll acquire a great fame."

Next year, in March of 755, we discover him fleeing
from the city of Lo-yang amid the confusion of the war
of An Lu-shan, whose troops occupied the city and made
the waters of the Lo River flow crimson with blood. The
poet went down to the province of Chehkiang, and finally
retired to the mountains of Luh near Kiu-kiang in
Kiangsi Province. When Li Ling, the Prince of Yung, became
the governor-general of the four provinces near the
mouth of the Yangtze, Li Po joined his staff. But the subsequent
revolt and the quick fall of the Prince in 757 lead
to imprisonment of the poet at the city of Kiu-kiang, with
a sentence of death hanging over him. On examination
of the case officials were inclined to leniency. One of
them, Sung Ssu-jo, recommended the emperor not only
to pardon Li Po but to give him a high place in the government
service. But the memorial, which by the way
had been written by Li Po himself at Sung's direction,
failed to reach its destination. Then Kuo Tsu-i, now a
popular hero with his brilliant war record, came to
the rescue; he petitioned that Li Po's life might be ransomed
with his own rank and title. The white head of
the poet was saved, and he was sentenced to perpetual
banishment at Yeh-lang—the extreme southwest region

of the empire covered by the present province of Yunnan.

He proceeded westward up the river leisurely. There
seems to have been little pressure from the central government,
certainly no inclination on the part of the
poet, to expedite the journey. At Wu-chang he was welcomed
by the local governor Wei, with whom he spent
months and climbed the Yellow Crane House three times.
Further up he encountered Chia-chi, his former companion
at Chang-an, and Li Hua, a kinsman of his. These
two had also been demoted and dismissed from the
capital. The three luckless men now joined in a boat
party more than once on the Tung-ting Lake under the
clear autumn moon. That these were not so lugubrious
affairs after all is attested by their poems.[5] After such
delays and digressions Li Po sailed up the Yangtze
through the Three Gorges and arrived in Wu-shan, Ssu-chuan,
in 759, when amnesty was declared.

The old poet started homeward, resting a while at
Yo-chou and Chiang-hsia, and returning to Kiu-kiang
again. He visited Nanking once more in 761; and next
year went to live with his kinsman, Li Yang-ping, who
was magistrate of Tang-tu, the present city of Taiping
in Anhwei. Here in the same year he sickened and died.

A legend has it that Li Po was drowned in the river
near Tsai-shih as he attempted, while drunken, to embrace
the reflection of the moon in the water. This was

further elaborated into a tale, which was translated by
Théodore Pavie. This story, quoted by d'Hervey Saint
Denys, is altogether too beautiful to omit. I retranslate
the passage from the French:

"The moon that night was shining like day. Li Tai-po
was supping on the river when all of a sudden there
was heard in the mid-air a concert of harmonious voices,
which sounded nearer and nearer to the boat. Then,
the water rose in a great tumult, and lo! there appeared
in front of Li Tai-po dolphins which stood on their
tails, waving their fins, and two children of immortality
carrying in their hands the banners to indicate the
way. They had come in behalf of the lord of the
heavens to invite the poet to return and resume his
place in the celestial realm. His companions on the
boat saw the poet depart, sitting on the back of a dolphin
while the harmonious voices guided the cortège. . . .
Soon they vanished altogether in the mist."

As to Li Po's family and domestic life the curiosity
of the western mind has to go unsatisfied. The Chinese
biographers never bother about such trivialities of a
man's private affairs. The Old and the New Books of
Tang are both totally silent. Only in his preface to
the collection of the poet's works Wei Hao remarks:

"Po first married a Hsu and had a daughter and a son,
who was called the Boy of the Bright Moon. The
daughter died after her marriage. Po also took to wife
a Liu. The Liu was divorced, and he next was united
to a woman of Luh, by whom he had a child, named
Po-li. He finally married a Sung."

Hsu, Liu, and Sung are all family names of the women

who were successively married to Li Po. Of his several
poems extant, addressed to his "wife," it is difficult to
tell just which one is meant in each case. From a poem[7]
written to his children we learn that the girl's name was
Ping-yang, and the son whom Wei Hao refers to by the
unusual nickname of the "Boy of the Bright Moon," was
called Po-chin. Of the third child, Po-li, mentioned by
Wei Hao, there is no reference elsewhere. Po-chin died
without having obtained any official appointment in 793.
His one son wandered away from home; while his two
daughters were married to peasants.

Although Li Po had expressed his desire of making the
Green Hill at a short distance southeast of Taiping-fu
his last resting place, he was buried at the "East Base"
of the Dragon Hill. His kinsman, Li Hua, wrote the
inscription on his tombstone. Twenty-nine years after
the poet's death a governor of Tang-tu set up a monument.
But by the second decade of the ninth century
when another great poet, Po Chu-i, came to visit the
grave, he found it in the grass of a fallow field. About
the same time Fan Chuan-cheng, inspector of these districts,
discovered the "burial mound three feet high, fast
crumbling away"; he located the two grandaughters of
Li Po among the peasantry, and on learning the true
wish of the poet, removed the grave to the north side of
the Green Hill and erected two monuments in January
of 818.

IV

The Old Book of Tang says that Li Po "possessed a
superior talent, a great and tameless spirit, and fantastical

ways of the transcendent mind." In modern terminology
he was a romanticist.

Like Wordsworth he sought the solitude of hills and
lakes. But he was a lover rather than a worshipper of
Nature. He was "enamored of the hills," he says. To
him the cloud-girt peak of Luh Shan, or the hollow glen
of autumn, was not a temple but a home where he felt
most at ease and free to do as he pleased—where he
drank, sang, slept, and meditated. He spent a large
part of his life out of doors, on the roads, among the
flowering trees, and under the stars, writing his innumerable
poems, which are the spontaneous utterances of his
soul, responding, to the song of a mango bird or to the
call of far waterfalls. And his intimate Nature-feeling
gained him admission to a world other than ours, of
which he writes:

Taoism with its early doctrine of inaction and with
its later fanciful superstitions of celestial realms,
and supernatural beings and of death-conquering herbs
and pellets fascinated the poet. Confucian critics, eager
to whitewash him of any serious Taoistic contamination,
declare that he was simply playing with the new-fangled
heresy. But there is no doubt as to his earnestness.
"At fifteen," he writes, "I sought gods and goblins."
The older he grew, the stronger became the hold of

Taoism on his mind. In fact, the utilitarian principle
of Confucian ethics was alien both to his temperament
and to the circumstances of his life. The first thing he
did after his dismissal from the court was to go to Chinan-fu
and receive the Taoist diploma from the high
priest of the sect, "wishing only (says Li Yang-ping) to
return east to Peng-lai and with the winged men ride to
the Scarlet Hill of Immortality." Peng-lai is the paradisical
land of the Taoist, somewhere in the eastern sea.
The poetry of Li Po reflects the gleams of such visionary
worlds. His "Dream of the Sky-land,"[8] rivaling Kubla
Khan in its transcendent beauty and imaginative power,
could not have been written but by Li Po, the Taoist.
Even in superstition and opium there is more than a
Confucian philosophy dreams of.

But mysticism and solitude filled only one half of the
poet's life. For he loved dearly the town and tavern—
so much so that he is censured again by moralists as having
been sordid. Li Po not only took too hearty an interest
in wine and women, but he was also scandalously
frank in advertising his delight by singing their praise in
sweet and alluring terms. In this respect Li Po, like so
many of his associates, was a thorough Elizabethan. Had
the Eight Immortals of the Wine-cup descended from
their Chinese Elysium to the Mermaid Tavern, how happy
they would have been with their doughty rivals in song,
humor, wit, capacity for wine, and ardent and adventurous,
if at times erratic, spirit!

Li Po "ate like a hungry tiger," says Wei Hao, who
should know; while according to another authority, "his
big voice could be heard in heaven." In his early youth
he exhibited a swashbuckling propensity, took to errantry,

and learned swordmanship, and even slashed
several combatants with his cutlass.

"Though less than seven feet in height, I am strong
enough to meet ten thousand men," he boasted. It is
hardly necessary, however, to point out the rare and
lovable personality of the poet, who made friends with
everybody—lord or prince, Buddhist or Taoist, courtier
or scholar, country gentlemen or town brewer; and
addressed with the same affectionate regard alike the emperor
in the palace and the poor singing-girl on the
city street of Chang-an.

In his mature age Li Po, despite his natural inclination
and temperament, cherished the normal Chinese ambition
to serve the state in a high official capacity and
try the empire-builder's art.[9] It was with no small anticipation
that he went to the court and discoursed on the
affairs of the government before the emperor. But he
was only allowed to write poems and cover his vexations
with the cloak of dissipation. Later when amid the
turmoil of the civil war he was called to join the powerful
Prince of Yung, his aspirations revived, only to be
smothered in the bitterness of defeat and banishment.
The last few years of his life were pathetic. Broken in
spirit and weary with the burden of sorrow and age, but
with his patriotic fervor still burning in his heart, he
watched with anxiety the sorry plight of his country.

The rebellion of An Lu-shan and its aftermath were
not wholly quelled till the very year of the poet's death.

Then, there was the inevitable pessimism of the old
world. The thought of the evanescence of all temporal
things brought him solace for life's disappointments, and
at the same time subdued his great tameless spirit. The
Chinese race was already old at Li Po's time, with a retrospect
of milleniums on whose broad expanse the dynasties
of successive ages were like bubbles. What
Shakespeare came to realize in his mellowed years
about the "cloud-capt towers and gorgeous palaces," was
an obsession that seized on Li Po early in life. Thus it
is that a pensive mood pervades his poetry, and many of
his Bacchanalian verses are tinged with melancholy.
Even when he is singing exultantly at a banquet table, his
saddest thought will out, saying "Hush, hush! All
things pass with the waters of the east-flowing river."