In Chinese history, poetry writing reached its zenith during the period of Emperor Xuan Zong (r. 712-756). During his reign, poets were honored with high positions in the Imperial Academy and higher seats in the court as well. Along with the five classics, poem writing was part of the civil service examinations during that period. Li Bai, Bai Juyi and Du Fu were among the most famous poets (Cooper and Du 23).
Li Bai was the most respected romantic poet of those times. Li Bai was inspired by Taoism and good wines. He exhibited wild and free imaginations in his poems especially in the context of nature. Du Fu, a good friend of Li Bai, belonged to a different style – one of realism. Du Fu’s poems revolved around social issues and were basically full of compassion for the poor and downtrodden. Du Fu condemned the rich who, he felt, enjoyed feasts while the poor starved to death on the roads. He also bled for the families of the soldiers who were fighting in the borders. Li Bai and Du Fu took romanticism and realism to great heights.
Li Bai, alias Taibai alias Li Po was a famous poet of the High Tang period. He wrote more than a thousand poems in his life and has been acclaimed as the Deity of Poetry. Li Bai loved drinking, swordplay and travel. Li Po as he was commonly known wrote many poems on the theme of drinking and being drunk. Li Po enjoyed his wine and also used it as a poetic metaphor for the good things in life. Life at its best, according to the verses of Li Po, is a kind of intoxication, an elevation; he felt that poetry like good wine should be able to promote self awareness and also be uplifting. Even nature, as Li Po likes to present it, has a kind of intoxicated quality, especially in spring.
The poet’s presentation of himself as drunkenly enjoying some natural setting is thus a cleverly unpretentious way of presenting transcendent states of mind and being. Li Po may be called a ‘romantic’ poet in that almost all his poems are to some extent dream-poems; many of his longer ones were like spirit-journeys related to the trances of mediums in early Chinese religious dances (Cooper and Du 35).
To a highly tradition-bound poetry, Li Po brought a sense of freedom and adventure. Li Po’s poems are simple and unpretentious. “High in the Mountains, I Fail to Find the Wise Man,” is a distinctive poem of Li Po. It begins abruptly, moves forward more unpredictably, and ends more astonishingly. The constant shift in visual imagery and sensation is charged with magic and beauty – ‘the sight of the deer’, ‘the sudden sky overhead’ and ‘the breathtakingly beautiful sight of the waterfall’. The Chinese valued Li Po for his spontaneity and freedom. There is a story that Li Po died when he drunkenly tried to embrace the reflection of the moon in the river.
Li Po had the gift of talking through the voices of other people. In the poem, “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.” Li Po spoke with the sensitivity and sensibility of a mature woman. He loved to handle themes of friendship and especially separation among friends. He felt a genuine distress when parting from friends. Poems of friendship and leave were handled in a very unique manner by Li Po. Most of the experts now date Li Po’s birth as 701, some eleven years older than Du Fu.
Born outside China, he grew up in Szechwan in China. As a young man he was interested in meditation and swordplay. He entered the service of the Emperor but was rather too undisciplined for court life, and soon undertook a life of wandering, study, wine and writing. Li Po can be seen as a very boastful character that was given to downright lying. He was irresponsible as a father, husband and citizen.
However, he had expensive tastes and love wine and women. Li Po himself, in a poem addressed to his wife, confesses that his drunkenness made him as good as no husband at all; but he never seems to have faced the fact that it also disqualified him for official service. During the period of civil war he was imprisoned for rebelling against the Prince. He died in relative poverty, famous in his own lifetime as an unusually gifted poet in a nation of poets. Li Po’s work is present in all of the standard anthologies of Chinese poetry.
Sample verse of Li Bai:
“Blue mountains lie beyond the north wall;
Round the city’s eastern side flows the white water.
Here we part, friend, once forever.
You go ten thousand miles, drifting away
Like an unrooted water-grass.
Oh, the floating clouds and the thoughts of a wanderer!
Oh, the sunset and the longing of an old friend!
We ride away from each other, waving our hands,
While our horses neigh softly, softly…. “(From: Taking leave of A Friend)
Du Fu, whose courtesy name was Zimei, was born in 712, one year before Emperor Xuanzong came to the throne. He was born into a distinguished family of literati. He is said to have born in Gong District in the Luoyang area of Henan. In his poems he refers to two periods of youthful wandering, the first, probably in the years around 731–735, to Jiangsu and the seacoast area of Zhejiang, and the second some years later to the northeast region of Shandong and Hebei.
At some point, probably in 735, he went to the capital, Chang’an, to take the examination for jinshi, or Presented Scholar. However, much to everyone’s surprise, he failed to make a passing grade. William Hung wrote of Du Fu that he “appeared to be a filial son, an affectionate father, a generous brother, a faithful husband, a loyal friend, a dutiful official, and a patriotic subject.”
During his youthful years in the Luoyang area, when he was already very active as a poet, he became acquainted with a number of well-known literary figures, among them the famous poet Li Bo or Li Bai (701–762), whom he greatly admired. In several poems in my selection, Du Fu recalls their period of friendship and expresses concern over the older poet’s welfare. The period of Du Fu’s youth, which corresponds to the early years of Emperor Xuanzong’s reign, was one of widespread peace and prosperity, a golden age in the annals of Chinese culture. But by the time he moved to Chang’an, there was chaos. Chinese armies garrisoning the borders were meeting with strong resistance from non-Chinese peoples such as the Turks, Tibetans, and Uighurs.
Du Fu, widely admired as China’s greatest poet is known for his technical brilliance. He had a fluent mastery of traditional forms and fused them in an innovative fashion. He reveled in adversity and showed some self-pity as well. Though he received some patronage and official recognition, he was not satisfied. He felt bitter and his poems began to reflect his concern for human suffering. This mood was further nourished by the historical events of the period.
His little son starved to death in a famine before Du Fu was able to get to his family and help them. The An Lu-shan rebellion broke out, and the poet had to flee with his wife and two children to a safer place. Du Fu was also held captive by enemy soldiers for a while. Eventually he managed to escape and join the exile court. But it took some time before he was reunited with his family. These tragic experiences filled him with great compassion and sorrow. He became a great poet, transcending self-pity and setting even his poems about pleasure in an implicit frame of pain.
Du Fu’s poems are autobiographical in nature and portray his true feelings. He documented his own life in great detail, placing it in the contexts of both historical change and day-to-day life, in the capital and in provincial villages throughout the empire. Thus, his poems also trace the history of China during Du Fu’s period. He wrote in a simple and casual manner that readers were able to easily bond with. Du Fu rated himself a failure and a disappointment. However, from the literary viewpoint, Du Fu was a hugely successful poet. Basically Du Fu wrote to please himself and express his feelings, and it probably made a greater and more individual poet of him.
His associations with ordinary people, peasants, artisans, and soldiers resulted in great poetry that documented the history of the period. Du Fu’s poetry deals with an extraordinary range of subjects and manages to transcend unhappiness and melancholy by its enormous range and immense humanity. Du Fu’s works have been widely translated. The Chinese scholar William Hung, titled his book on Du Fu as “Du Fu: China’s Greatest Poet”. American poet and translator Kenneth Rexroth, who rendered some of Du Fu’s poems in English describes Du Fu as “the greatest non-epic, non-dramatic poet who has survived in any language”.
Though about fourteen hundred poems attributed to Du Fu have been passed on across generations, about one hundred of his poems are widely admired and anthologized by the Chinese and others within the Chinese cultural sphere. Through his poems he projected an image of great moral sincerity that admiration for the poet’s character has even sometimes outshone, the literary evaluation of his writings. It is because of this he was crowned “Sage of Poetry,” making him the artistic counterpart of Confucius himself. A second epithet frequently bestowed on him, is that of “poet-historian,” because of the large amount of historical information contained in his works.
His poems documented the unsettled times in which he lived and the lives of the common people, during the period. His works had prosodic breadth and variety, and a similarly impressive breadth of subject matter. Du Fu’s language is rich and ranges from highly polished diction of earlier court poetry to colloquialisms of the poet’s own day, from language that is studied and heavily allusive to that which is startlingly direct and “unpoetic.”
He demonstrated that virtually all levels of language could be accommodated in the poem. So great was Du Fu’s command of the language and literary tradition that he could elect to write on any theme or in any manner he chose, combining themes or styles in ways that were wholly without precedent. Even in the difficult closing years of his life, his work is tirelessly innovative and experimental.
One major characteristic of Du Fu’s poetry is his realism. His poem “Northern Journey,” shifts back and forth between the political concerns of the entire nation and Du Fu’s private family affairs. Translating Du Fu’s work is difficult and challenging. However, the power and appeal of Du Fu’s work and the importance of its place in world literature entices many people to translate to his work into other languages.
Sample verse of Du Fu:
“A year gone by, arriving at my thatched hut, wife and children, clothes a hundred patches: our cries mingle with the voice of the pines; the sad fountain joins our muffled sobbings. The little boy we’ve spoiled all his life, face paler, whiter than snow, sees his Papa, turns away in tears, dirty, grimy, feet with no socks. By the bed my two young girls, mended skirts scarcely covering their knees, a sea scene, the waves chopped up, bits of old embroidery sewn all askew, marine monster, purple phoenix topsy-turvy on their coarse cloth jackets…… Old husband, feeling somewhat poorly, vomiting, runny bowels, several days laid up in bed. But don’t think I’ve no fabrics in my bag to save you from the shakes and shivers of the cold! Here’s powder and mascara—; I’ll unwrap them—; quilts, coverlets—;I’ll lay them all out. The face of my thin wife regains its brightness; my silly girls start in combing their own hair. They copy all the things they’ve seen their mother do, step by step applying morning makeup, taking their time, smearing on rouge and powder—; how ridiculous—;drawing eyebrows this wide! But I’m home alive, facing my young ones, and it’s as though I’ve forgotten about hunger and thirst. They keep asking questions, outdoing each other in pulling my beard, but who’d have the heart to scold them? “- (Northern Journey, Lines 59-88)
Thus we find that Du Fu and Li Bai or Li Po were contemporary poets of China who give different angles to the history of the period. While Du Fu is more of a realist, Li Po is more of a romanticist and they complimented each other in recording China under T’ang through their works. Arthur Cooper says it best: “Li Po, a legendary carouser, was an itinerant poet who is unsurpassed in the scope of his fanciful imagination and who soars to sublime heights in his descriptions of natural scenes and powerful emotions.
He has been called “the immortal of poets”. Du Fu is a more popular poet. His experiences of civil war imbue his work with great compassion and earthy reality, shot through with humor and desolation, as he views everyday life with an artist’s insight”. Together these two poets span a whole wide range of human life and feelings.
Works Cited
Luo, Jing (2004). Over a Cup of Tea: An Introduction to Chinese Life and Culture. University Press of America. 2004.
Li, Xiaoxiang and Yang (2005). Liping Gateway to Chinese Classical Literature. Asiapac Books Pte Ltd. 2005.
SACU (2007). Introduction to Chinese Poetry. Web.
Young, David (1990). Five Tang Poets: Wang Wei, Li Po, Du Fu, Li Ho, Li Shang-Yin. Oberlin College Press. Oberlin, OH. 1990.
Kline A. S. (2000). Like Water or Clouds: The T’ang Dynasty and The Tao. Web.
Watson, Burton (2002). The Selected Poems of Du Fu. Columbia University Press. New York. 2002.
Cooper, R. V. Arthur and Du, Fu (1973). Li Po and Tu Fu. Penguin Classics. 1973.