The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Li Bai · 李白, style name Taibai, 701 to 762 · the poems in verse, about a thousand as transmitted: songs and yuefu, old-style verse, quatrains, a minority in regulated verse, and the fifty-nine Old Airs (Gufeng) · the body as it is read, in Wang Qi’s annotated text · scored on the Chinese, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Chinese quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own close English beneath and David Hinton’s versions for sense
Mode
Lyric and song of the High Tang: the yuefu and the old-style song made personal, the drinking song, the quatrain, the farewell, and the Old Airs as a sequence of vision and judgment
Mythos
The banished immortal exiled from heaven into wine and mountains; the moon as companion, home and the permanent against the mortal; the shaman’s flight of the Chu ci; the drinker who keeps faith with what cannot return it
Phase
A life from Sichuan to the court at Chang’an, about 742 to 744, dismissal and wandering, the An Lushan rebellion, condemnation to exile at Yelang in 758, pardon in 759, and death at Dangtu in 762
Presentation
Short poems in many forms: five- and seven-character quatrains, songs whose lines run from three characters to more than ten, old-style verse, regulated verse, and the fifty-nine Gufeng; gathered after his death from what survived the rebellion
Register
From the cry that opens the road to Shu to the stillness of a mountain watched until nothing else is left; from the court song written to order to the refusal to bend the waist
Scale
Mountains, rivers, gorges and a waterfall; the court, the frontier, the soldier and the soldier’s wife; the immortals; the ruined kingdoms of the past; a young wife, a friend at a ferry, children left in Shandong; and one self throughout
Governing Proposition
About a thousand poems by the poet of the High Tang whom his age called the banished immortal: songs in lines of irregular length, the old folk forms of the yuefu filled with a first person, drinking songs and moon poems, quatrains of twenty and twenty-eight characters, farewells, poems of the court and the frontier, and the fifty-nine Old Airs. The wager of the body is that the poet’s own person, transported, ironical and unbowed, can be the subject of the poem, that hyperbole can be a way of knowing, and that a self kept free of office can be measured, poem by poem, against what lasts: the mountain, the river and the moon.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The poem every Chinese reader knows is twenty characters long. “床前明月光，疑是地上霜。舉頭望明月，低頭思故鄉”
(Before the bed, bright moonlight; I take it for frost on the ground. I raise my head and look at the bright moon; I lower my head and think of home). Only three characters come twice, and each repetition is deliberate: “bright moon” twice, and “head” twice, in the raising and the lowering of the head in the third and fourth lines. The light of the first line is mistaken for frost in the second, and the mistake is the poem’s turn: a man takes the moonlight for something cold on the ground, looks up and finds the moon, and looking down finds home.
Even this text has a history. The version learned by heart today is a revision of the Ming; the older editions read otherwise, and variants of this kind run through the whole body. What comes down is about a thousand poems in verse, descending from the collection Li Yangbing made at Dangtu in 762, the year of the poet’s death, whose preface says that much had been lost in the disorders, and from the editions of the Song. The unit here is that body as it is read, in the annotated text of Wang Qi of the eighteenth century. The prose and the fu are set aside; the song lyrics in the later ci form attributed to him are almost certainly later and are excluded; poems of doubtful attribution are not leaned on.
The forms are chiefly old-style verse, the yuefu and songs in lines of irregular length, and quatrains, with regulated verse a minority, and the fifty-nine Old Airs, the Gufeng. The life behind them bears on them. Li Bai was raised in Sichuan, was at court in Chang’an as an academician of the Hanlin from about 742 to 744 and was then dismissed; He Zhizhang named him “謫仙人”
(the banished immortal). He met Du Fu in 744. In the An Lushan rebellion he served on the staff of Prince Yong, was condemned to exile at Yelang in 758, was pardoned on the way in 759, and died at Dangtu.
Movement II
Shu dao nan, Hard Is the Road to Shu, begins with a cry before it begins with a sense: “噫吁嚱，危乎高哉！蜀道之難，難於上青天”
(Ah! how perilous, how high! The road to Shu is harder than climbing the blue sky). Its lines run from three characters to more than ten. The road lurches in the line, and the cry comes back as refrain. The form of the poem is the road’s form, and what the poem knows of height and danger it knows through that lurching.
Jiang jin jiu, Bring in the Wine, opens with a river: “君不見黃河之水天上來，奔流到海不復回”
(Do you not see the Yellow River’s water coming down from the sky, rushing to the sea and never returning?). The song is additive by design, the cup filled and filled again, and its accumulation is its argument. It ends by selling the horse and the fur coat for wine: “與爾同銷萬古愁”
(with you I will dissolve the sorrow of ten thousand ages). The waterfall at Lushan falls “三千尺”
(three thousand feet), and might be the Milky Way. In the dream journey to Mount Tianmu the poet climbs into the halls of the immortals and wakes on his pillow.
This is hyperbole made a way of knowing, not a figure laid on: the river comes from heaven because the sorrow it measures is older than any man, and the road is harder than the sky because the poem has to be climbed. It is the body’s signature, and its risk. Met a hundred times, the hyperbole sometimes becomes manner, and the lesser drinking songs repeat the gesture without the necessity.
Movement III
“Drinking Alone by Moonlight”, four poems, finds its company where there is none. “舉杯邀明月，對影成三人”
(I raise my cup to invite the bright moon; with my shadow we make three). The company is made by the lonely mind and is known to be made. The poem ends in a pact of “無情遊”
(a wandering free of feeling), friendship sworn with what cannot return it. Whether the pact is joy or desolation the poem does not say, and twelve centuries have not settled it.
The moon carries the body. It is the companion here, the home in “Quiet Night Thought”, the one sight that the soldier at the frontier and his wife can share, in “Moon over the Passes” and in the Ziye Wu ge: “長安一片月，萬戶擣衣聲”
(one moon over Chang’an, ten thousand households beating clothes). And it is the permanent set against the mortal: “今人不見古時月，今月曾經照古人”
(people now do not see the ancient moon; this moon once shone on the ancients), from “Holding Wine and Asking the Moon”.
Across the body the poems build one figure, the banished immortal, exiled from heaven into wine and mountains and keeping company with the moon. So completely was the figure built that it absorbed the man: the legend that he drowned reaching for the moon in the river. The particulars stay particular, the frost on the floor, Wang Lun singing on the bank. Where the figure is weakest it calls on the apparatus of immortals and elixirs and does not build with it.
Movement IV
The first of the Old Airs states a programme of return: “大雅久不作”
(the Great Odes have long gone unwritten). It looks back past the ornate centuries of the Six Dynasties, while the new regulated forms were in the ascendant. The swerve came through the return. He took the anonymous yuefu and filled it with a first person, broke the line, and made his own person the subject of the poem. The stake was a career staked on genius and patronage, and the court was lost within two years.
The dream of Tianmu ends in the refusal: “安能摧眉折腰事權貴”
(how could I bow my brows and bend my waist to serve the powerful?). Against it stand the three Qingping diao, written to order for Yang Guifei, “雲想衣裳花想容”
(clouds think of her robes, flowers of her face). The court pieces strain the body’s law, though they can be read as the immortal’s play. The law itself is the self’s freedom measured against what lasts, mountain, moon and river, and what does not, office, dynasty and youth, with wine as the solvent between them.
The same law holds the poems of the world. “Fighting South of the Wall” gives the cost of empire and closes on the Laozi, that weapons are instruments of ill omen, used by the sage only when he must. The song of Changgan gives a girl’s love from childhood to separation, year by year. In the Old Airs and the poems on old sites the kingdoms of Wu and Yue are partridges and grass, and in the nineteenth of the Old Airs the rebellion is seen from the sky, blood on the wild grass and wolves in officials’ caps. A letter-poem goes to his children, left in Shandong. These orders are present, and one persona joins them; they are present more often than they are integrated.
Movement V
The quatrains are the body at its most exact. In “Departing Baidi at Dawn” the boat has passed ten thousand mountains before the gibbons on both banks have stopped crying: twenty-eight characters, none repeated, and the speed is the subject. At the Yellow Crane Tower, seeing Meng Haoran off, the sail vanishes into the blue sky. On Jingting Mountain the birds go and the cloud goes, and what is left is “相看兩不厭，只有敬亭山”
(looking at each other, never tired of it: only Jingting Mountain), twenty characters with none spent twice.
The making hides itself. “浮雲遊子意，落日故人情”
(drifting cloud, the traveller’s mind; setting sun, an old friend’s feeling) holds the parallel couplet in perfect balance; “抽刀斷水水更流，舉杯銷愁愁更愁”
(draw a sword to cut the water and it flows the more; raise a cup to dissolve sorrow and sorrow is the more), lets the doubled characters do the work of the image. Across the thousand the making is less even: carelessness, repetition, and a regulated verse less exact than Du Fu’s or Wang Wei’s.
Du Fu wrote of him “筆落驚風雨，詩成泣鬼神”
(when his brush fell, wind and rain were startled; when a poem was done, ghosts and spirits wept), and the tradition has paired them since, “詩仙”
(the immortal of poetry) beside “詩聖”
(the sage of poetry). Han Yu set the two together; the Song critics weighed the immortal against the sage; the bold and unrestrained verse of Su Shi descends from him; the Tang shi sanbai shou of 1763 and every school primer carry him. He is read in the kanshi of Japan and in Korea and Vietnam. Through Fenollosa’s notes, Pound’s Cathay of 1915, half of it his, helped make English free verse, and Mahler set German adaptations of him in Das Lied von der Erde. Few could build on a manner so his own; later poets learned their practice from Du Fu.
Act III · The Twelve
Subtract and see. At its height the body passes the test as few lyric bodies do. “Sitting Alone on Jingting Mountain” is twenty characters with none repeated: the birds go, the cloud goes, and what remains is “相看兩不厭，只有敬亭山”
(looking at each other, never tired of it: only Jingting Mountain). Take out a line and the emptying cannot happen. “Quiet Night Thought” turns on two motions, the head raised to the moon and lowered to home, and holds nothing else. The long songs are necessary differently: Jiang jin jiu is additive by design, the cup refilled, and its accumulation is its argument. What holds the axis lowest but one is the body as a whole: a thousand poems, among them many farewells, drinking poems and poems to patrons that repeat the figures of the best (the moon, the cup, the white hair, the drifting cloud) without needing to exist. The core is necessary; the body is not.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The danger on this axis is that the poems give a mood, transport or melancholy, and mood ranks below meaning. The best of them state something that holds. “Drinking Alone by Moonlight” discloses the structure of solitude: “舉杯邀明月，對影成三人”
(I raise my cup to invite the bright moon; with my shadow we make three), a company made by the lonely mind and known to be made, ending in a pact of “無情遊”
(a wandering free of feeling), friendship with what cannot return it. “Fighting South of the Wall” states the cost of empire and closes on the Laozi, that weapons are instruments of ill omen, used by the sage only when he must. The song of Changgan follows a girl’s love from childhood to separation, year by year. Held a tenth above the bar because much else is mood, superbly rendered, and the social disclosure is thinner than Du Fu’s.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The body’s summit and its signature, at the top in height and in frequency. Shu dao nan opens on a cry, “噫吁嚱，危乎高哉！蜀道之難，難於上青天”
(Ah! how perilous, how high! The road to Shu is harder than climbing the blue sky). Jiang jin jiu opens on a river falling from heaven and ends by selling the horse and the fur coat for wine, to dissolve “萬古愁”
(the sorrow of ten thousand ages). The Lushan waterfall falls “三千尺”
(three thousand feet) and might be the Milky Way. The dream of Tianmu climbs into the halls of the immortals and wakes on a pillow. The quiet heights come as often: the sail at the Yellow Crane Tower vanishing into blue sky, the mountain that does not tire. Held off the very top because the hyperbole, met a hundred times, sometimes becomes manner.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Myth built, and built from the poet himself. Across the body the poems construct one figure, the banished immortal, exiled from heaven into wine and mountains and keeping company with the moon. The moon is load-bearing: the companion of “Drinking Alone”, the home of “Quiet Night Thought”, the one sight shared by soldier and wife, “長安一片月，萬戶擣衣聲”
(one moon over Chang’an, ten thousand households beating clothes), and the permanent against the mortal, “今人不見古時月，今月曾經照古人”
(people now do not see the ancient moon; this moon once shone on the ancients). The Tianmu poem builds the shaman’s flight of the Chu ci into a structure that ends in refusal of the court. The myth absorbed the man: the legend that he drowned reaching for the moon in the river. Held a step down because the Daoist apparatus of immortals and elixirs is often evoked rather than built.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance was the verse of the Six Dynasties and the early Tang, with the new regulated forms ascendant. His stated programme was a return: the first of the Old Airs begins “大雅久不作”
(the Great Odes have long gone unwritten) and looks back past the ornate centuries. The swerve came through the return. He took the impersonal, anonymous yuefu and filled it with a first person; he broke the line, as in Shu dao nan; he made hyperbole a mode of knowing rather than a figure; and he made his own person, drunk, banished and immortal, the poem’s subject. The stake was real: a career staked on genius and patronage, the court lost within two years, and the refusal written into the Tianmu poem. Held a tenth above the bar because the forms he used were old, and the formal reorganisation of Chinese verse in his century was Du Fu’s, in regulated verse, more than his.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. “Quiet Night Thought” knows what it knows through its parallel couplet: 舉頭 and 低頭, the head raised and the head lowered, moon and home in one motion, the frost mistaken in the second line prepared by the light in the first. In prose it is a homesick man looking up. “Departing Baidi at Dawn” is one breath of twenty-eight characters with none repeated: the boat has passed ten thousand mountains before the gibbons on both banks have stopped crying, and the poem’s speed is its subject. Shu dao nan has the road’s form, its lines lurching from three characters to more than ten, the cry returning as refrain; Jiang jin jiu staggers in the metre of drink. Held off the top because many poems across the body use a received form in the received way, as a container: the form is the instrument in the best hundred, not in the thousand.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence over promise: twelve and a half centuries of reading, from Du Fu’s poems to him and Han Yu’s pairing of the two, through the Song critics who set the immortal against Du Fu the sage, to Wang Qi’s commentary, and in the last century to Arthur Waley, Stephen Owen and Paul Kroll on his Daoism. The best poems stay open. Is the moon-drinker’s pact joy or desolation? Is “Quiet Night Thought” the simplest poem in the language, or a poem about how a mistake, light taken for frost, becomes knowledge? Are the Old Airs allegory or vision? Held below the top on the evidence: the commentary is far thinner than Du Fu’s, the received judgment being that these poems give themselves at once, and their apparent spontaneity has invited admiration more than exegesis. Some of that is the critics’ failure, but the axis weighs what return has shown.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The field is Chinese poetry of the eighth century, the High Tang, and the Chinese tradition after it. The force: he made the poet’s freed self, transported, ironical and unbowed, a possibility of the lyric, fused Daoist transcendence with the drinking song, and brought the quatrain to a height the tradition sets beside Wang Changling’s and no higher. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with Du Fu he is one of the two names by which Chinese poetry is measured, the immortal of poetry to Du Fu’s sage; the line of bold and unrestrained verse through Su Shi runs from him; he is read in the kanshi of Japan and in Korea and Vietnam; and through Fenollosa’s notes, Pound’s Cathay (1915), half of it his, helped make English free verse. Held a step down because his manner was inimitable and few could build on it; later Chinese poets learned their practice from Du Fu.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Survival over a millennium and a quarter, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Span: read without break for twelve and a half centuries, in anthologies of his own lifetime, in the Song editions, in the Tang shi sanbai shou (1763) and in every school primer since. Presence: the widest of any Chinese poet. “Quiet Night Thought” is learned by nearly every Chinese child, and the poems are recited, set, inscribed and translated into the major languages. The charge is on form. The body as it stands is the remnant of a larger one, much of it lost in the rebellion by Li Yangbing’s account; attribution is uncertain at the margins; and the received texts of some of the most famous poems are later revisions, “Quiet Night Thought” among them. What survives survives whole and in use. Set at the foot of the millennia band, the form charged a little for loss and variance.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Judged on the Chinese as far as this reading can judge it; the Tang sound, unheard as a Tang reader heard it, is neither credited nor charged. Command shows in the control of parallelism, “浮雲遊子意，落日故人情”
(drifting cloud, the traveller’s mind; setting sun, an old friend’s feeling), from “Seeing a Friend Off”, a regulated poem; in quatrains with no character spent twice; in the timing of the long songs, which move between lines of three, five, seven and more characters and land the refrain where the breath fails; and in the art that hides art, “抽刀斷水水更流，舉杯銷愁愁更愁”
(draw a sword to cut the water and it flows the more; raise a cup to dissolve sorrow and sorrow is the more), where the doubled characters do the work of the image. The making is load-bearing in the best poems. Charged: carelessness and repetition across the body, and a regulated verse less exact than Du Fu’s or Wang Wei’s, by the tradition’s own account.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the terror of Shu dao nan and the stillness of Jingting Mountain; or the three Qingping diao, written to order for Yang Guifei, “雲想衣裳花想容”
(clouds think of her robes, flowers of her face), and the refusal in the Tianmu poem to bend the waist to the powerful. One law governs most of the range: the self’s freedom measured against what lasts, mountain, moon and river, and what does not, office, dynasty and youth, with wine as the solvent between them. Terror and stillness both obey it; so do the war poems and the women’s laments, where the moon carries the same permanence. The court pieces strain the law, though they can be read as the immortal’s play, and the occasional verse often sits outside any law but convention. A wide range, mostly held.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Judged as a lyric body, not charged for being lyric, and what it holds weighed as it is. The natural order, held at its deepest: mountains, rivers, the moon, gibbons, the waterfall. Consciousness, in its transports and its melancholy. The sacred, in the Daoist heavens and the immortals. History, in the Old Airs and the poems on old sites, where the kingdoms of Wu and Yue are partridges and grass. The state: the court, the frontier, the soldier and his wife, and in the nineteenth of the Old Airs the rebellion seen from the sky, blood on the wild grass and wolves in officials’ caps. Love and the family, in the song of Changgan and the letter-poem to his children left in Shandong. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that one persona joins them: the orders are present more often than integrated, and the family, labour and society are thin beside Du Fu’s.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime at 9.5 and The Imperishable at 9.5, then The Made at 9.2, and The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition at 9.0. Heights at the top in frequency and in reach, from the cry that opens the road to Shu and the river falling from heaven to the stillness of Jingting Mountain; a body read without break for twelve and a half centuries and learned by nearly every Chinese child; quatrains with no character spent twice and long songs timed to the breath; a myth of the banished immortal built from the poet himself, with the moon load-bearing throughout; and one of the two names by which Chinese poetry is measured.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8, held by its single persona: the natural order, the state, history, the sacred and love are present more often than integrated, and the family, labour and society are thin beside Du Fu’s. Next, The Inevitable at 8.4, the core necessary but the body of a thousand not, its many farewells and drinking poems repeating the figures of the best; then The Unconcealment at 8.6, much of the body mood rather than meaning, and The Swerve at 8.6, a swerve made through old forms. The Tang sound is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 9.2, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.5, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.6 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by one tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 8.4, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Every summit condition is met; the body is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, which The Encompassed, The Inevitable, The Unconcealment and The Swerve hold down.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the poems of Li Bai (李白, style name Taibai, 701 to 762), scored as the body as it is read: the poems in verse, about a thousand as transmitted, descending from the collection made by Li Yangbing at Dangtu in 762 and from the Song editions, read in the standard annotated text of Wang Qi (Qing, eighteenth century). The prose, among it the letter to Han Jingzhou and the preface to the spring-night banquet in the peach and plum garden, and the fu are set aside; the song lyrics in the ci form attributed to him, “Pusa man” and “Yi Qin’e”, are excluded as almost certainly later; poems of doubtful attribution are not leaned on. Weighed most: the songs and yuefu, the moon poems, the quatrains and the fifty-nine Gufeng. Every score is judged on the Chinese, which is not in hand; no quotation was checked against a file. Chinese is quoted in the traditional characters only where its words are certain, and in the received text; beneath each quotation stands a plain English rendering in parentheses, made for this page and not taken from any published translation. The Tang sound is not heard here as a Tang reader heard it, and is neither credited nor charged. Translations · David Hinton’s Selected Poems of Li Po (1996), for sense; Vikram Seth’s Three Chinese Poets (1992), for the English poem; Arthur Waley’s The Poetry and Career of Li Po (1950), for the life; Pound’s Cathay (1915), as a historical object rather than a version. Stephen Owen’s The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High T’ang (1981) is the critical frame. None is quoted, and no translation’s shortfall is charged to the poems. Poems are cited by title. Matters that could not be verified are not given, among them the place of the poems in the Quan Tang shi, the share of the work lost in the rebellion, the date of Yin Fan’s anthology, whether he sat the examinations, the wording of the older editions of “Quiet Night Thought”, and the labour of the Qiupu songs.