In the Library
Quiet Night Thoughts
Li Bai, 730 CE
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 minutes
- Translated by
- Translated by Hal Wall (2026)
- Original
- Original zh
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 0k words
£1.99
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Before my bed the moonlight lies so bright, I take it for the frost that falls at night.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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The Odyssey
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Homer builds a ten-year epic from the same longing for home that Li Bai fits into twenty characters, the pull toward a place you cannot yet reach.
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The Thatched House Unroofed by an Autumn Gale
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Du Fu was Li Bai's friend and the other great poet of the Tang, and his storm-torn roof turns the same clear eye on hardship and on home.
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About the book
Moonlight pools on the floor beside the bed, so pale and still that for a moment a traveler far from home mistakes it for frost. He lifts his head to the bright moon, lowers it again, and thinks of the place he came from. That is the whole poem: twenty characters, four short lines, the smallest possible motion of a head raised and a head bowed. Almost every child in China learns Quiet Night Thoughts by heart, and grown people still murmur it at the Mid-Autumn Festival when the moon comes up round and cold over a country of people who are all, somehow, missing somewhere. Li Bai wrote it thirteen centuries ago and it has never once loosened its hold. It knows the exact ache of being awake in a strange room, of looking up at the one thing you and everyone you love can see at the same time, and feeling the distance in it.