Extract

We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.

Moonlight falls on the floor like frost, and a traveller lifts his head before lowering it toward home: in four lines, Li Bai conjured an image of longing so perfect that Chinese schoolchildren have memorized it for twelve centuries. The great Tang dynasty poet, born around 701, lived as a wanderer, a court favourite briefly, and a drinker of legendary capacity, and his poems carry the freedom of a man who refused to be tamed by convention. He wrote of mountains and rivers, of friendships sealed with wine, of the moon as companion, and his language achieves an effortless clarity concealing formidable craft. His is a poetry of elemental encounters, the solitary self before the vastness of nature, still speaking to anyone willing to look up.