The Poems

The story goes like this. A boy named Luo Binwang, age seven, was at home when a guest came to visit. The guest had heard the boy was clever, so as they walked together past a pond where geese were swimming, he asked: can you make a poem about that?

The boy looked at the geese and made this poem on the spot.

That was around the year 626. Luo Binwang grew up to become one of the Four Paragons of the Early Tang — four young poets whose work helped shape what Tang poetry would become. He had a difficult life later: he challenged the Empress Dowager Wu Zetian, joined a failed rebellion, and disappeared from history around 684. Nobody knows for sure what happened to him.

But the goose poem outlived everything. For more than thirteen hundred years it has been the first poem most Chinese children memorize — the open door to all the rest. The triple é, é, é is meant to sound like the goose itself honking. Try it aloud.

Meng Haoran lived in the early 700s, in the southern region of what is now Hubei province, on a mountain called Lumen. He was a quiet man. He tried to become a court official and failed. He spent most of his life walking in the mountains, fishing, visiting friends, writing poems about the small things he noticed.

This poem is one of the most famous in the Chinese language. It is the very first poem in a book called Poems of a Thousand Masters, which has been used to teach Chinese children for almost a thousand years. Most children memorize it before they can read.

Twenty characters. Listen to what it does. The poet wakes up. He does not get out of bed. He hears birds. He remembers, vaguely, that there was wind and rain in the night. And he wonders — not anxiously, just gently — how many flowers have fallen.

That is the whole poem. It is also one of the gentlest things in any language.

This is the riddle poem. Read it again and try to guess what it is describing.

A mountain you can see but the colors stay forever. Water that doesn't make a sound. Flowers that don't fade when spring ends. Birds that don't fly away when someone walks up.

The answer is in the title: huà, painting. The poem is describing a painting on a wall. The painted mountain has colors. The painted water makes no sound. The painted flowers never wilt. The painted birds never fly away.

For a long time this poem was attributed to Wang Wei, the great Tang poet-painter who lived from 699 to 761. He was famous for being both a master poet and a master painter, and people loved the idea that he wrote a poem about a painting. But scholars now think the poem may have been written later — possibly by a Chan Buddhist monk in the Song dynasty, or possibly even later. Nobody is sure.

What is sure is that for hundreds of years, Chinese children have learned this poem and tried to solve its riddle. The answer is always the same. It is always a painting.

If you ask any Chinese person to recite a Tang poem from memory, this is the one they will recite. It is twenty characters long. It was written around the year 726, when Li Bai was twenty-five years old, far from home, in a guesthouse somewhere in the Yangtze region. He couldn't sleep.

He saw moonlight on the floor by his bed and for a moment thought it was frost. He looked up at the moon. He looked down. He thought of home.

That's the whole thing. There is nothing fancy in it. There is no clever metaphor, no rare word, no learned allusion. Just a young man, alone, looking at the moon, missing his family.

And somehow, for the last thirteen hundred years, every Chinese person who has had to leave home for any reason — for work, for study, for war, for love, for survival — has read this poem and known exactly what Li Bai was feeling.

Li Bai went on to become the most beloved poet in Chinese history. He wrote a thousand poems, many of them grand, wild, and strange. But this small one, written young, is the one everyone knows.

In the year 759, Li Bai was almost sixty years old, and he was in deep trouble. China was in the middle of the An Lushan Rebellion — eight years of civil war that broke the Tang dynasty's golden age. Li Bai had backed the wrong prince in a power struggle, and the new emperor sentenced him first to death, then to banishment in a faraway frontier called Yelang.

He set off slowly upriver into the Yangtze gorges, expecting never to come back. He stopped to visit friends along the way. He wrote poems about the journey. His hair turned white.

Then, somewhere in the mountains, news caught up with him: the emperor had pardoned him. He was free.

He turned the boat around and shot back downriver. The Yangtze gorges were famous for their speed — the current can carry a boat hundreds of miles in a day if you let it. Li Bai let it. Qīng zhōu — "light boat" — is the soul of the poem. The boat is light because his heart is light. The mountains are flying past because he is flying past. The monkeys are screaming on the cliffs and he can barely hear them, because he is going home.

Liu Zongyuan was a brilliant young official at the imperial court. In the year 805 he supported a reform movement that lasted only a few months before it collapsed. The new emperor punished everyone who had been involved. Liu was banished from the capital to a remote southern town called Yongzhou, in present-day Hunan. He was thirty-three years old.

He stayed there for ten years.

This is one of the poems he wrote during that time. Twenty characters. A thousand mountains, ten thousand paths, all empty. No birds. No people. Just one old man in a small boat, fishing in the snow.

Chinese painters have been drawing this scene ever since. Look it up — you will find a thousand paintings of one boat and one fisherman in a vast white emptiness. The poem and the painting have become almost the same thing.

What makes the poem land is the fisherman's stubbornness. The whole world has gone silent. He keeps fishing anyway. People who have read this poem in hard times have always recognized the man in the boat.

Bai Juyi was one of the most popular poets of his time. He wrote in a way ordinary people could understand, and he wrote a lot — close to three thousand poems survive. He served as a government official for most of his life and used his poems to argue for things he cared about: peace, fairness, kindness.

And then there are poems like this one.

A kid sneaks out in a little boat, pulls some lotus pods, and tries to slip back home without anyone noticing. But the boat has cut a perfect straight line through the duckweed on the surface of the pond. The trail is right there. Bai Juyi can see exactly what the kid did.

Every grown-up who reads this poem laughs. Every kid who reads this poem recognizes themselves. The detail of the duckweed-trail is so specific that you know Bai Juyi has actually watched this happen — maybe his own child, maybe the neighbors' — and is writing it down in pure delight.

Twenty characters. One small life. One small crime. One sweet moment, twelve hundred years old.

Li Bai was twenty-four years old. He had just left his home in Sichuan for the first time, and he was traveling east, downriver, looking for adventure and a way to make a name for himself. He stopped at Mount Lu, in what is now Jiangxi province. There is a peak there called Incense Burner because it is shaped like one and the morning mists rise from it like smoke. There is a waterfall on the side of that peak that drops hundreds of feet straight down.

Li Bai stood at the bottom and looked up.

The waterfall is not really three thousand feet tall. It is not really the Milky Way pouring out of the sky. But that is what it felt like, standing there, and Li Bai's gift was to write what it felt like rather than what it was.

This is one of the most famous Tang poems about a single place. People have visited Mount Lu for twelve hundred years to stand where Li Bai stood and look up at the waterfall and try to see what he saw. Some of them claim to. Most of them, looking at an ordinary waterfall, walk away wondering what kind of mind sees a galaxy in falling water.

The answer is: Li Bai's mind. That is why he is the poet he is.

Du Mu lived at the end of the Tang dynasty, when the empire was no longer the glorious place it had been in Li Bai's youth. He worked as a government official, traveled often, and wrote some of the most beautifully made poems in the language — precise, balanced, no word out of place.

This is an autumn poem, and a happy one. The poet is riding up a cold mountain on a stone path. He sees houses high up, where the clouds form. He stops his cart for one reason: he loves the maple forest in the late afternoon light.

And then the last line, which is the line everyone remembers: the leaves of autumn, touched by frost, are redder than the flowers of spring.

Most poems about autumn in Chinese tradition are sad — they are about endings, about cold coming, about the year dying. Du Mu's poem is the opposite. He looks at the red leaves and sees more brightness, not less. There is a famous pavilion on a mountain in Hunan called Ai Wan Ting — Pavilion of Loving the Late, named after this poem's third line. People go there in autumn just to sit and look at maple trees, the way Du Mu did, twelve hundred years ago.

Some loves grow stronger when the season turns.