ON THE ROAD AGAIN

The immortality pills and the drinking caused Li Bai to become ill in the summer of 746. For several months he was bedridden and often coughed violently. During the fall he often had fantastic dreams: in them, he wandered to distant places and even to the celestial spheres, where he encountered deities and witnessed splendid views of heaven. He recorded his visions in the poem “Singing of My Visit to Mount Tianlao in My Dreams.” The poem, one of his most celebrated longer pieces, presents the majestic hills and grand architectural constructions on the celestial mountain and his tours through its landscape. The poet describes himself as a divine visionary who belongs to the heavenly space and is welcomed by deities. These verses are meant to demonstrate his yearning to transcend worldly existence and strife. Li Bai was still tormented by his resignation in the capital and struggled to accept it. The last few lines of the poem express this inner struggle:

世間行樂亦如此 古來萬事東流水

別君去兮何時還 且放白鹿青崖間 須行即騎訪名山

安能摧眉折腰事權貴 使我不得開心顏

《夢遊天姥吟留別》

Human happiness is similar to those dreams.

Since ancient times

Everything has been like the flowing water

That will never return.

Friends, I am leaving now,

But when will I come back?

For now I’ve sent the white stag in the green mountain.

When I travel, I will ride it to legendary hills.

How could I drop my eyes and bow

To the rich and powerful,

Not letting myself smile and laugh at will!

Li Bai told his friends about his desire to travel, but they urged him to wait until he was fully recuperated—at least until the spring. His family tried to dissuade him as well, but to no avail. By now his estate was somewhat substantial, with many acres of farmland and at least two houses, but he didn’t feel attached to his properties. He wanted to visit the sites haunted by recluses and holy men. He longed to wander in unworldly lands like a semi-deity, a xian.

Realizing that Bai could not be persuaded to stay, or even to delay his journey, his friends threw a farewell dinner party for him. At the gathering he presented them with “Singing of My Visit to Mount Tianlao in My Dreams,” which he signed “As a Keepsake.” Then he set out, despite the cold weather and his frail health.

He headed south. His first stop was Suiyang, a town in Liang Park in Henan, where he and his friend Cen Xun had once planned to meet. It was snowing heavily when he arrived, and he soon learned that Cen Xun was preparing to depart for Minggao Mountain, more than two hundred miles to the west. Tired of the government job that he had taken two years before, he longed to become a recluse in the mountain. He had just sold most of his belongings and was working to wrap up his affairs so that he could get to Minggao Mountain before the end of the year.

Although Bai’s arrival took him by surprise, Cen Xun was overjoyed to see him. The two friends went to a tavern, where over dinner they vented their anger and despair. Bai composed a long poem for Cen Xun. The verses lament the harsh landscape of his friend’s destination, symbolizing the danger and hardship of the political life that Cen Xun was about to leave behind. Bai had never been to Minggao Mountain, but he described it imaginatively in his poem. In the second half, “Song of Minggao Mountain, Seeing Cen Xun Off,” Bai stacks up analogies that evoke the ugliness of the official arena: “Chickens swarm together to grab food / While a phoenix has to stand away and alone. / Earthworms dare to laugh at dragons / And fish eyes can pass for pearls.” Bai shared his friend’s desire to have cranes as his companions as he wandered hills and waters.

From Suiyang he traveled farther south, mostly by boat, and soon arrived at the city of Yangzhou. It was mid-March now—spring in the air, orioles warbling, white viburnum flowers scattered on shrubs like butterflies—but the charm and warmth of the place didn’t cheer him. He purposely avoided others. His return to Yangzhou must have been deeply emotional: this was where, two decades before, he had been stranded, sick and penniless, and his friend Meng Rong had him nursed back to health. At that time—despite his poverty, homesickness, and obscurity—Bai had been full of lofty spirit and aspirations, believing he would grow into a literary and political giant. It was here, lying in his sickbed, that he had composed “Reflection in a Quiet Night,” the masterpiece that had made him famous. Now he was staying in an inn alone, exhausted and ashamed. Yet he couldn’t help writing once more about this city, which occupied a singular place in his memory. In the verses he produced, “Farewell to My Friends in Guangling (Yangzhou),” he remembered the joy and adventure that he and his friends had once found here. They all believed that Bai would rise high enough to reach the palace. Indeed he had. But what now? As he wrote, “I rode a tiger but dared not dismount / And soared with a dragon that suddenly fell out of the sky.”

He had now become clear about the purpose of this trip. These days his thoughts often turned to his onetime mentor at court, He Zhizhang. Bai knew that the old poet had retired to his hometown, Kuaiji (modern Shaoxing); he wanted to go see him, but he would travel at his own pace and let the journey ahead unfold naturally.

Soon he arrived in Nanjing and spent the entire spring there. Although very fond of the city, he again avoided others and kept to himself. When he had first come to Nanjing twenty-one years before, he had written a slew of songs for singers and dancers. This body of work had founded his reputation as a poet who celebrated good wine and pretty courtesans. Now, at age forty-six, he no longer cared about female charms or lighthearted songs. Instead, on the bank of the Yangtze he strolled alone for a long while and composed a solemn poem:

鳳凰臺上鳳凰遊 鳳去臺空江自流

吳宮花草埋幽徑 晉代衣冠成古丘

三山半落青天外 二水中分白鷺洲

總爲浮雲能蔽日 長安不見使人愁

《登金陵鳳凰臺》

On the Phoenix Terrace phoenixes once roamed,

But now the birds are gone

And only an empty terrace spreads on the flowing river.

Grass and flowers cover the silent paths at the Wu Palace

While the crowns and gowns of the Ji dynasty

Are all buried in their ancient graves.

Three hills stand beyond the clear sky

As a band of water divides the Isle of White Heron.

Hovering clouds can always block the sun

And the absence of Chang’an gives me grief.

“ASCENDING THE PHOENIX TERRACE IN JINLING”

This poem, written in regulated verse with seven-character lines, is one of Li Bai’s best. The restrictive form was not generally one of his strengths, but this is an extraordinary exception. With this poem, he had now produced a masterpiece in every poetic form of his time. Two decades before, Bai had been so awestruck by Cui Hao’s regulated poem on the wall of Yellow Crane Tower that he declined to write anything there himself, knowing he would only suffer by comparison. But now he had grown into a poet capable of excelling in any form. The poem is as good as Cui Hao’s, even if there are still traces of influence (its ending is clearly derived from Cui Hao’s closing couplet). Some even consider it superior to Cui Hao’s, though others have pointed out minor defects in its versification. In spirit, however, the poem is stronger and deeper than Cui’s—“the clouds” and “the sun” (Son of Heaven) allude to the political situation in Chang’an, adding a historical dimension that Cui’s verses lack. Bai was aware of the transient nature of dynastic splendor and glory, embodied here by the deserted Wu Palace and the interred Ji gowns and crowns. Far away from court, Li Bai would no longer be able to return to the political heart of the country, and such a loss filled him with anguish. The last line shows his longing for the capital, which had never left his mind ever since he had resigned. Yet by now his art had deepened with maturity—his poetry was beginning to possess a kind of gravity absent from his early work. Despite his continued desire to soar to the heights of political power and even into a celestial world, his art was becoming more earthbound, more rooted in reality.

All the chronologies of Li Bai’s poems agree that in the summer of 747 he arrived at Yunyang (present-day Danyang, Jiangsu), a town east of Nanjing, where he would visit Heng Mountain. Outside the town, on the canal, he came upon a group of laborers pulling a barge loaded with an enormous rock, quarried as a treasure stone and an article of tribute. The sun was scorching, and sweat glistened on the backs of the men. Even cicadas in the treetops sounded tired and thirsty. As the men trudged past him with the barge, they broke into a work song. Bai had seen such trackers—boat pullers—many times before along the Yangtze, but had never paid much attention to them, let alone been moved to sing of their plight. But now, standing on the canal’s bank and gazing at those struggling men with bent shoulders and shaved heads that could make their sweating more endurable, his eyes misted over. His heart ached for them, and he composed this poem:

雲陽上征去 兩岸饒商賈

吳牛喘月時 拖船一何苦

水濁不可飲 壺漿半成土

一唱都護歌 心摧淚如雨

萬人系磐石 無由達江滸

君看石芒碭 掩淚悲千古

《丁都護歌》

Going up north from the town of Yunyang,

I’ve seen many rich merchants on the riverbanks.

In the Wu land even buffalos pant hard in the dog days.

Look, how hard the laborers are pulling a barge.

The muddy water is undrinkable,

Every kettle half filled with mud after being boiled.

From far away comes the work song the men are chanting.

It breaks my heart, my tears flowing.

Thousands of men quarry huge stones,

But they can hardly ship them to the riverside.

Look at the giant stones scattered around—

The endless sorrow makes me weep.

“SONG OF DINGDUHU”

This is another one of his masterpieces and marks a new development in his art. Beginning in 747, Li Bai’s poetry began to register more of the dark aspects of common people’s lives, as though he was becoming a bard of the land. However unhappy he himself may have been, he couldn’t stop singing, and his songs echoed the bitterness and suffering of the people at the bottom of society. As a result, the following years saw the peak of his poetic art. His voice grew deeper and more resonant as he produced verses full of gravity and significance. He was no longer a romantic poet only capable of making popular songs: more and more his art spoke of his country and time.

Finally he arrived at Kuaiji, where he planned to see his old mentor; but to his dismay, he learned that He Zhizhang had passed away three years before. The old poet’s two-story house was half-deserted now, though lotus flowers still bloomed in the limpid pond and willows still wavered in the breeze. At the sight of the flowers that Zhizhang must have loved so much, remembering the happy times they had spent together in the capital, both of them drinking with abandon, Bai became overwhelmed. How he loved that old man! He went to pay his respects at Zhizhang’s grave under a large cypress. Later, drinking alone in the town, he wrote two short poems in memory of his beloved friend.

Bai proceeded east to the coast, but didn’t reach the seaside. Instead, he climbed Tiantai Mountain, which the ancients had regarded as divine and which Li Bai believed to be a place free of earthly cares. This was a mountain he had often dreamed of. In fact, before setting out on the road at the end of 746, he had written in his poems that he wished to see this very mountain, the land inhabited by gods and spirits. Now he was here, but the place was far from what he had imagined—he found no deities but some coolies on the steep trail carrying goods with shoulder poles and bamboo baskets. Still, he loved the sight of the towering, gnarled pine trees standing along the trail that led to the summit. The view of an august temple moved him; the sound of a babbling brook and the sight of stone bridges over streams and gulches lifted his spirit. Without delay he climbed up to the summit. There he was struck by the magnitude of the view: the misty ocean in the east, the clouds in the west shading a chain of hills. This indeed was the so-called Peng-lai Land of Xian, but where were the deities? Bai knew that kings and emperors had visited this mountain in search of a paradise on earth, but none of them had ascended into the divine order as they earnestly pursued immortality—all met their ends in tombs built of earth and stones. Now as he gazed out at the vista, he felt somehow let down. His yearning to discover an ethereal domain had just been a fixture of fantasy. Pain and misery still stirred in his chest, sinking deeper into his being. He descended the mountain disillusioned.

He composed a poem about this experience. In it he talks about his inability to escape the dark, ugly world and find the celestial place that he dreamed of. He asks, “Don’t you see the palaces and tombs have become ashes and dirt, / Which only shepherds come to scale? / Robbers and thieves snatched away the treasures, / But when did deities ever do something about it?” (“Climbing up a High Mountain and from Its Top Gazing at the Sea Far Away”). His mind was unable to let go of what he had witnessed in the capital, the center of evil in many eyes. He felt trapped, grounded on earth.

According to most of the Li Bai chronologies, in the spring of 748 he returned again to Nanjing, a city he loved, home to a vibrant literary scene. But his arrival was quiet and hardly noticed by others. He spent a good deal of time with a friend in the city who was known as Wang Twelve. Wang’s full name and life have remained a mystery, but we do know that through this man Bai gradually learned about the numerous abuses of power that had occurred in recent years. The central government had manufactured many baseless cases against people, including some of Bai’s friends, falsely accusing them of misdeeds or crimes and destroying their lives. There was his friend at the palace, Cui Zongzhi, the handsome man “like a jade tree in the breeze,” who at first had been promoted for his role as a lead singer in the celebration of the canal that reached the capital (the waterway was vital for transporting grain). But within two years Cui’s superior was unjustly charged with collaborating with foreign powers and thrown into prison. Everyone who had been involved in the celebration, down to the boat rowers, was seized and punished. Many were tortured to death; some committed suicide by swallowing poison. Thanks to his inconsequential post, Cui was merely banished to a small county south of Dongting Lake.

Then there was the tragedy of Li Yong, the older man whom Li Bai had met and befriended at the dinner party in Jinan after his Daoist induction. Because of Li Yong’s fame as an essayist and his seniority in government administration, he was regarded as a rival by Li Linfu, the primary chancellor to the emperor (and an enemy of Bai’s as well). Li Yong, as the governor of Beihai Prefecture, was fond of luxuries and somewhat careless in handling administrative affairs. Whenever possible, he would spend his time hunting in the wilderness or partaking in dinner parties. But he was unaware that his enemies were monitoring him, reporting his small misconducts to the evil powers at the emperor’s side. Soon he was accused of spreading rumors against the royal family and disparaging the policies instituted by the central government. Li Linfu dispatched two lackeys to Beihai Prefecture, where they interrogated Li Yong in the courthouse. The old man was outraged and protested openly even as they had him flogged with sticks. He cursed them until they beat him to death in front of his subordinates. A few of his colleagues were also implicated in the case, and they too were eliminated—killed or driven to suicide.

What shocked Li Bai most was the case of Marshal Wang Zhongsi, a loyal, peace-loving man whom Bai had held in high esteem. Bai remembered how at court Wang had opposed the emperor’s plan to send an expeditionary army to Tufan to capture Stone Fort, believing that a site of such little strategic value was not worth sacrificing thousands of soldiers. But the emperor coveted the vast land west of the fort, which stretched north to the side of Qinghai Lake, and believed the small town could be a significant factor in future negotiations with Tufan. Because His Majesty was fond of Marshal Wang he didn’t openly show his displeasure, but Li Linfu could read the emperor’s intentions and later commenced the expedition himself. The court ordered Marshal Wang to lead the campaign. His troops fought bravely but suffered heavy casualties and were ultimately unable to take the stronghold, which was protected by high cliffs and steep gorges. Wang’s failure enraged the emperor, who ordered him executed, but his assistant commander, Vice Marshal Geshu Han, managed to save Wang’s life and resume the attack. For three months the Chinese soldiers charged up the fortress and finally took the town. To their horror, they found a mere four hundred defenders, who had surrendered only because they had run out of food and reinforcements. But this small number of troops had inflicted more than sixty thousand casualties on the Chinese army. A catastrophe, not a victory! Such an outcome shocked the whole of China, though nobody would dare to voice their discontent openly. Marshal Wang’s warning about the cost in lives turned out to be true.

Nonetheless, Wang was thrown into jail and suffered interrogations and tortures. Then he was banished to Hanyang, where he soon died. Unlike most of the men of letters at the time, such as Wang Wei and Gao Shi, who praised the “victory,” Li Bai was blunt about this disaster and even condemned Geshu Han, a man he had once admired. In a poem, he urged others, “Please don’t learn from Geshu, who carried a sword and marched through Qinghai, / Attacking Stone Fort to earn a purple robe for himself” ( “In Reply to Wang Twelve in a Cold Night While Drinking Alone”). The purple robe was a garment for Tang officials whose ranks were higher than the third. Bai here points out that Geshu sacrificed his troops for his own gain.

He was so incensed by the court’s self-destructive actions that he composed the following poem in the form of a folk song:

去年戰桑乾源 今年戰蔥河道

洗兵條支海上波 放馬天山雪中草

萬里長征戰 三軍盡衰老

匈奴以殺戮爲耕作 古來唯見白骨黃沙田

秦家築城避胡處 漢家還有烽火然

烽火然不息 征戰無已時

野戰格鬥死 敗馬號鳴向天悲

烏鳶啄人腸 銜飛上掛枯樹枝

士卒塗草莽 將軍空爾爲

乃知兵者是兇器 聖人不得已而用之

《戰城南》

Last year we fought at the source of the Sanggan,

This year we are fighting along the Chong River.

We’ve washed our weapons on the waves of Lake Balkhash

And grazed our horses at Tianshan Mountain covered in snow.

Fighting thousands of miles west of home,

All the troops have grown feeble and old.

The Huns take killing as their livelihood

And since ancient times there have been only

Yellow deserts growing white bones.

The Qin people built the Great Wall against the barbarians,

On which the Han men lit beacons of war.

The fire hasn’t stopped burning

As war has continued ever since.

Soldiers fell on battlegrounds

Where riderless horses neighed piteously to the sky.

Crows pulled out human guts

And hung them up on leafless branches.

Soldiers’ blood spilt on wild grass,

Yet generals could gain nothing at all.

Please understand that war is a lethal thing,

Which the wise will not use unless they must.

“ZHAN CHENGNAN”

The last two lines are quoted from the Tao Te Ching. Although they sound somewhat intrusive, a bit dissonant from the verse’s collective voice, they carry a message that was of primary importance to Li Bai. The geographic names are all places northwest of the frontier and give the impression of endless battlefields.

Li Bai couldn’t contain his anger at China’s military actions and spoke plainly for the soldiers. This was something new in his poetry, which by now had shed all the lightness and decadent touches of his early work. His voice had grown deeper, more resonant, and more emotional as his art became starker and more truthful.

Wang Twelve also told Bai of the fate of his poet friend Wang Changling, who, though exiled to the southern hinterland, had managed to return to the capital a few years before. The reason for his new banishment was vague—it was said only that he had been “careless about his demeanor,” implying that he had offended someone powerful at court. Hearing that his friend had left for a small remote county in Longbiao (modern Hongjiang, Hunan), Bai wrote a short poem for his friend: “When poplars drop their catkins and cuckoos begin to sing, / I’ve heard you pass five streams to reach Longbiao. / I’m sending you my sorrowful heart through the bright moon, / Which flows with the wind to west of Yelang” (“On Hearing Wang Changling Demoted to Longbiao”). Li Bai couldn’t know that years later, he himself would go the same way, banished to Yelang. There was no way for him to foresee that his own misfortune would be greater than his friend’s; what he does in the poem is assure Changling that their friendship, pure like the bright moon, will outlast the hard times.

Stunned by the news of his friends’ deaths and exiles, Bai tried to remain detached. He felt helpless, as he confessed to Wang Twelve: “I compose poems and essays at the north window, / But ten thousand words are not worth one cup of water” (“In Reply to Wang Twelve in a Cold Night While Drinking Alone”). So he boated on rivers and lakes, wearing his Daoist gown inside out so that people might not recognize him. He joined young men in hunting rabbits with hawks. He spent more time drinking and playing games with new friends in taverns and restaurants. But in the end, he couldn’t keep his grief and anger at bay. He wrote satirical poems mocking corrupt officials and condemning them in various voices. He never signed his name to any verse that criticized the central government or the emperor. Nevertheless, people knew that the poems were Li Bai’s.