by Ha Jin
The prefect of Binzhou, Li Can, was a hospitable man who kept an open house for a wide range of visitors. He received an annual salary of two thousand dan (one dan is approximately one hectoliter) of grain, which was unusual and similar to the yearly earnings of a circuit governor or a full minister, and he could afford to throw dinner parties for his guests every two or three days. Musicians, dancing girls, singers, and acrobats often performed in his hall until midnight. When he met Li Bai and heard his predicament, he was sympathetic. Considering that they shared the same surname, it was possible that they were blood relatives—a connection Bai openly claimed, calling the prefect a cousin of his. Li Can saw Bai’s talent and, though it was impossible to recommend him for any post at the moment, wanted to keep tabs on him. He didn’t mind feeding an extra mouth, so he invited Bai to stay in his residence. Bai, eager to find a place near the capital, accepted the offer.
For two months Li Can held frequent parties and banquets, at which Li Bai accompanied the guests. They watched dances, listened to songs, and composed poems as they feasted. Bai enjoyed the food and wine and the merriment in the beginning, but soon began to feel he was merely wasting his time. If he continued to live like this, he might ruin himself with nothing accomplished. So he began to write poems addressed to the host or honored guests to convey his longing (while at the same time heaping praises on them). Nonetheless, he couldn’t help drawing a contrast between his own plight and Li Can’s privileged life. One of his poems reads:
忆昨去家此为客 荷花初红柳条碧
中宵出饮三百杯 明朝归揖二千石
宁知流寓变光辉 胡霜萧飒绕客衣
寒灰寂寞凭谁暖 落叶飘扬何处归。。。
《豳歌行，上新平長史兄粲》
When lotus flowers were pink and willows green
I left home and have become a guest.
At night I go out downing three hundred cups,
Dreaming I will be paid two thousand dan of grain.
By now I am familiar with the light in guestrooms
And also the frost and chilly winds of the frontier.
Who can warm the cold ashes and melt my loneliness?
Or tell me where the leaves are heading in the wind?…
“SONG OF BIN, FOR BROTHER LI CAN PREFECT”
Bai’s claim of “downing three hundred cups” a day is not a groundless boast. In addition to high-alcohol wines, low-quality wines, which contained little alcohol and were mostly home-brewed, were also available, and so it was not entirely implausible for one to consume such a large quantity.1 In addition, the cups were small and usually each held only two or three ounces.
The poem, mild as it was, provoked mixed feelings in Li Can when he read it. What Bai said made good sense, but he seemed also to complain that Li Can had not helped him enough, and as a consequence, he was stranded in Binzhou.
This made Li Can reassess Bai’s case. He began to suspect that the poet might be essentially ungrateful, with deeply entrenched character flaws; otherwise, how else could Bai have encountered one setback after another for so many years? Now Bai even coveted his benefactor’s kind of salary, two thousand dan of grain annually. Li Can saw Bai’s extraordinary ambition, which to some extent unnerved him, so he decided to let Bai go. The sooner he got rid of this recalcitrant fellow, the better. He sent for Bai and told him that Wang Song, a councilor at the government of Fangzhou (modern Huangling County, Shaanxi), needed an aide and that Bai should go there to seize the opportunity.
Li Bai had no choice but to leave for Fangzhou, which was about seventy miles north of Chang’an. Like Li Can, Wang Song was fond of company and of songs and dances performed in his residence. He treated Bai decently, inviting him to dinner parties now and then. He introduced him to his other guests, some of whom later became Bai’s friends. As before, Li Bai composed poems to please his new host and to impress the guests, but from time to time he could not help alluding to his own predicament in the hope that Wang might recommend him for a suitable position at the local government. Wang Song, like his friend Li Can, didn’t make an effort to help Li Bai’s career, unsure of the poet’s character and afraid of becoming implicated if Li Bai caused trouble. Moreover, as a mere councilor at the prefecture’s administration, he had little power—people respected him mainly as a figurehead.
When Bai saw the true situation he was in, he decided to leave. Out of courtesy Wang gave him a handsome amount of cash for his travel expenses, which Li Bai badly needed. He calculated that with this money he would be able to stay in the capital for quite a while, so he decided to head back to Chang’an.
Wang Song’s parting generosity touched Bai. Before leaving, he wrote a poem to express his gratitude and reiterate his aspiration: “I hope to help a righteous lord. / After I succeed, I will return to my old woods. / Why did I come west all the way? / To make true friends while bearing a long sword. / Birds love green mountains far away / And fish dive into ocean vast and deep.” The poem ends with the hope that Wang Song and Bai will one day visit each other so that they can stay on a mountain and enjoy the music of the lute (“Farewell to Councilor Wang Song”).
During this time Bai missed his wife back in Anlu, but he could not return to join her without any achievement to show in his quest for office. Instead, he kept working on a group of eleven love poems addressed to his wife, collectively titled “To the One Far Away.” It is believed that Li Bai mailed some of these poems to her in his letters home, which she perhaps never received since mail was unreliable. These poems are uneven and a few seem unfinished, but some of them express the love and attachment between him and her:
六
陽臺隔楚水 春草生黃河
相思無日夜 浩蕩若流波
流波向海去 欲見終無因
遙將一點淚 遠寄如花人
《寄遠》
6
Your terrace is beyond the Chu water
While spring grass spreads along the Yellow River.
My thoughts of you torment me day and night
Like the river’s tumbling waves
That are flowing toward the ocean
And fading from view in an instant.
All I can do is gather some tears
For the one like a flower blooming far away.
We can see that Li Bai could hardly say anything original about his feelings for his wife. He even romanticizes the recipient of the letters as an ideal, unavailable lover, as Poem 10 states that he writes in a foreign script for the lover who lives far away at the western frontier. By nature he was not a family man, and though he undoubtedly missed his wife, his poems for her seem generic, spoken in conventional tropes. He labored to complete those poems and make them original, and yet they don’t stand out among his larger body of love poems.
In the spring of 731, Li Bai started out for the capital. He no longer had a foothold there: his wife’s cousin, Fuqian, would surely shun him, and inns in the city were expensive. By now he had spent a good part of the cash Wang Song had given him, so he passed Chang’an without entering it. He went farther south to Zhongnan Mountain, where he had once stayed in Princess Yuzhen’s abandoned villa. This time, however, he lodged at a local temple, where he could always find a bed. He called the place Secret Lair of Pines and Dragons. He also went to visit a local friend, a farmer named Husi. Li Bai was very fond of this man and his farmstead. Bai’s lodging place, the temple, was on the southern side of Zhongnan Mountain, but Husi’s home was on the northern side. We know nothing about the circumstances in which Li Bai had befriended Husi, whom he affectionately called “Mountain Man,” but evidently he cherished their friendship and loved the farmer’s home. In a poem, Bai describes the idyllic beauty and the tranquility of the place:
暮從碧山下�
�山月隨人歸
卻顧所來徑 蒼蒼橫翠微
相攜及田家 童稚開荊扉
綠竹入幽徑 青蘿拂行衣
歡言得所憩 美酒聊共揮
長歌吟松風 曲盡河星稀
我醉君復樂 陶然共忘機
《下終南山過斛斯山人宿置酒》
At dusk I descend the green mountain,
The moon following me all the way.
As I turn to see the road I walked
The endless woods stretch like emerald swells.
My friend takes me toward his farmhouse
Where his kids open the bramble gate.
Along the bamboo we stroll on a quiet path
As turnip leaves flap against our clothes.
Happily we chat, completely relaxed
And raise our cups now and again.
We sing loudly with the wind in the pines.
When we’re done, stars turn sparse.
The host grows more delighted, seeing me drunk—
Together we have forgotten this world.
“DESCENDING ZHONGNAN MOUNTAIN AND STAYING AT MOUNTAIN MAN HUSI’S HOME, WHERE WINE FLOWS”
Such a bucolic poem is rare by Li Bai, since he was not fond of the rustic life. We can see that the poem echoes the spirit of Tao Yuanming’s poetry about nature and farmwork. It celebrates a harmony, albeit momentary, between humans and their surroundings. To some extent, it also speaks of the ideal space to which Li Bai imagined retiring if he ever succeeded in his political ambitions.
Li Bai was good at relating to common people, capable of understanding their lives, joy, pain, and suffering. During this time, when he traveled to and around Chang’an and when he actually stayed in the capital itself, he wrote other poems about common people; some of them are in the form of folk songs and are among his best. Here are two poems from his “Midnight Songs” composed during this period:
三
長安一片月 萬戶搗衣聲
秋風吹不盡 總是玉關情
何日平胡虜 良人罷遠征
四
明朝驛使發 一夜絮征袍
素手抽針冷 那堪把剪刀
裁縫寄遠道 幾日到臨洮
SONG 3
The moon shines on the City of Chang’an,
Where ten thousand households are beating laundry.
The autumn wind blows endlessly,
Always sending over feelings from Jade Pass.
When shall we subdue the barbarians
So our men can stop battling far away?
SONG 4
The emissary will start out tomorrow morning,
So we are busy tonight sewing robes for our men.
Bony hands are pulling cold needles
And it’s hard to handle scissors for a whole night.
What we’ve made will travel a long way
Though we have no idea when they will reach Lintao.
Jade Pass and Lintao, far west of Chang’an, were the frontier areas where the Tang army often fought the tribal forces that troubled the borderland. The persona here is a collective female voice, speaking from the perspective that of the women left behind by the soldiers on the expedition. These poems have completely shed the decadent sentiment of singing girls and courtesans present in so many of Li Bai’s early poems about women. The dignified folk songs embody the new depth and maturity of his art, conveying a historical drama that is often absent in his earlier poems with female personae. His frustrations and suffering in the Chang’an area must have made him a more compassionate man, and his poetry benefited from that.
At the end of the winter, he returned to the capital, planning to enjoy springtime in the city, which was said to be gorgeous, but Chang’an disappointed him yet again. He spent plenty of time at restaurants and taverns, believing that he might encounter powerful men there and even accomplished poets. But now he kept running into hoodlums, who were mostly from rich and influential families, good for nothing and only abusing the poor and the weak. Several times he even fought with them, since he was skilled with the sword and always ready to meet challenges. Once he was nearly beaten up by a band of gangsters, but a new friend of his summoned the police and rescued him just in time. Yet during this stay, Li Bai also made several genuine friends who were in a similar situation and had come to the capital to seek office. Together they reveled and vented their discontent and anger. At parties and restaurants he saw that some insolent young officials were actually ne’er-do-wells, incapable of office work and unable to use arms. They held positions largely because they were knowledgeable in irrelevant subjects such as ball games, cockfights, dogfights, cricket fights, even running kites—“expertise” that was apparently appreciated by some top officials and lords. These upstarts had mansions, land, businesses, packs of bodyguards. They would bully people at random and have pedestrians driven aside when they passed through the downtown. Their horses and carriages threw up dust and upended vendors’ stands while their lackeys beat gongs and barked at people.
The more Bai encountered such parvenus, the more outraged he became. He composed a set of poems titled “Hard to Travel,” which allegorically expressed the impossibility of men of humble origins to advance through society with honesty. He chanted one of these poems at a party: “It’s hard to travel, hard to travel! / There’ve been so many forks and wrong turns / That I no longer know where I am…./ The road is broad like heaven / But I alone have no way out.” At another party, he wrote a poem that ends with these lines: “What I enjoy is a jar of wine when I’m alive. / Why should I need a name of ten thousand years after I’m gone?” His friends all shared his misery and could not see a ray of hope. The capital was full of young office-seeking scholars like them, all desperately trapped in such an impasse. Bai realized that he must not mingle with those derelict souls for too long, because that would only lead to despair.
In the spring of 732, he decided to leave Chang’an and head home.
AWAY FROM THE CAPITAL
Bai didn’t go back to Anlu directly—he chose to travel by boat down the Yellow River to Bianzhou (modern Kaifeng). From there he could continue home by land—such a trip would be faster than the usual route via Luoyang City. He also wanted to see Liang Park on the Bian River near Bianzhou. The park was a historic site, originally used as a retreat by the royalty of the Han dynasty. It was immense, one hundred miles in circumference. In Li Bai’s mind, the grounds were splendid, with buildings, pavilions, charming lakes, and blossoming bushes, but when he arrived at the park, he was quite disappointed. In front of him spread endless ruins—half-dead trees, dried-up streams, broken walls, and shards of tiles among weeds. There was no trace of the splendor described by so many ancient writers. Such a desolate scene cast a dark shadow on Bai’s mind.
From the park he went to a nearby town and sat in a tavern on a hill slope, from which he could catch the view of the Yellow River in the distance, its ocherous waters nearly motionless. He ordered strawberries, and as he ate them with fine salt, his mood began to lift. He was amazed to see a burly servant with a shaved head waving a large fan in the dining hall, because it was only May, the weather quite mild. This gave Bai the illusion that it was already midsummer. He reminded himself to enjoy everything while he could. Life was too short to be wasted lamenting ruins and losses. These details are recorded in his poem “Song of Liang Park,” composed at the tavern. Toward the end of the poem, he turns meditative and shows misgivings about his fruitless quest:
昔人豪貴信陵君 今人耕種信陵墳
荒城虛照碧山月 古木盡入蒼梧雲
樑王宮闕今安在 枚馬先歸不相待
舞影歌聲散綠池 空餘汴水東流海
; 沉吟此事淚滿衣 黃金買醉未能歸。。。
《梁園吟》
Lord Xinling was once rich and powerful,
But today crops grow on his grave.
Moonlight bathes the ruined town and park,
Where old trees stretch toward boundless clouds.
Where is Emperor Liang’s palace?
Where are talents like Sima Xiang-ru and Mu Cheng?
The shadows of dances and the tunes of songs were scattered
On the green ponds, though the Bian still flows toward the sea.
To lament these things makes me tearful
And I squander gold for wine, reluctant to go home….
As Bai wrote, tears trickled down his cheeks and wet the front of his robe. Yet the grief didn’t crush him, and he still dreamed of rising above his circumstances to realize his ambition, which he also believed was his way to help the common people who would always benefit from peace and responsible governance. This emotional push and pull reflected the torment of his soul and became a dramatic pattern and source of tension in his poetry.
Again he avoided returning to Anlu directly. Instead, he wandered westward to visit historical sites that interested him. Mount Song, in the west of Henan, was the birthplace of the Quanzhen Dao, the main branch of Daoism. The site was known as a retreat for many accomplished Daoists. Throughout history, masters had made their homes there, and some had even started their own sects and created their own versions of Daoism on the mountain. Today, the Shaolin Monastery sits on Shaoshi Hill, which is part of Mount Song.