Li Bai's Poetry by Li Bai (750)

Pour the wine and look up: in one of Li Bai's most loved poems he sits alone with a jar among the flowers, lifts his cup to the moon, and counts his own shadow as a third guest, so that a man drinking by himself becomes a small unruly party of three. That is the trick of him, turning solitude into company, exile into a country he can carry. The Tang court wanted a flatterer; he wanted the mountains, the road, the next jar, and the plain words that catch a feeling whole. Few poets say so much with so little furniture: a head raised to the bright moon, a head bowed, and suddenly the whole ache of being far from home. Legend has it he drowned reaching from a boat to embrace the moon's reflection on the river. You believe it, because in his poems the moon is always just there on the water, and he is always reaching.