March 15, 2020
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Li He
After three years away from you,
I'm back at last for one day, and more.
We drink green Luling wine this evening
and I see yellow cloth-wrapped books, like when I left.
My sick bones still exist,
so nothing is impossible in this world!
Why bother to plead with the dice,
just throw them and let them roll!~ Li He (797-817)
Distantly related to the imperial clan and extremely talented,
Li He was nevertheless an unsuccessful scholar who attained
only the lowest posts in his brief life (he died at the age of
twenty-six). His poetry, like that of Meng Jiao, can be bitterly
sarcastic and reflects the frustration he must have felt in his career.
He had a penchant for erotic, romantic, and even morbidly violent
imagery, and his poems grated on the nerves with the shrieking of ghosts,
weeping of flowers, and the burning of sinister fires. He was something
of a Chinese Edgar Allen Poe, though a much better poet than Poe was,
and like Poe, his reputation suffered because literary culture
couldn't stomach his unclassifiable works of genius. Sponsored in his day
by the prominent poet and prose writer Han Yu, Li He quickly
disappeared from literary consciousness after his death, making a comeback
only in the last two centuries. Two hundred forty of his poems have survived
centuries of neglect, though legend states that what remains was part of a larger
collection that was thrown into a toilet by a vindictive cousin.
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