A young Li Bai bids farewell to...
No spoilers. Read the poem.
Escorted All the Way to Jingmen Hill Before We Part Li Bai I'll sail beyond the Jingmen border line To start my journey in the land of Chu: The mountains sink away in wild plains, The Yangtze flows into some younder blue, The moon flies in the mirror of the sky, Some clouds construct great castles in the air— My hometown stream has wound a thousand miles To send me off; I'll miss its tender care. 李白 渡荆门送别 渡远荆门外，来从楚国游。 山随平野尽，江入大荒流。 月下飞天镜，云生结海楼。 仍怜故乡水，万里送行舟。
At the age of about 25, Li Bai left his family home in Shu (now known as Sichuan, mountainous, with a high plateau), and set off to travel around the Tang Empire and make his fortune. He travelled first by boat, along the Yangtze River towards what is now Hunan/Hubei, but was traditionally known as the Kingdom of Chu (it hadn’t been a real kingdom since the Warring States, 1,000 years ago, but names stick). A hill by the name of Jingmen (“gate of Jing” - an even more ancient name for the same area) marked the traditional boundary between Shu and Chu. As he passed it, he wrote this beautiful little classic, which has been, so far as I can tell, disastrously misinterpreted by translators, Chinese and English, ever since.
The first thing to note is that this is not a travel poem. Li Bai would go on to become famous for his travel poems, glorious descriptions of the geographical wonders that Tang imperial servants would discover as they trekked the country on the government’s business. Here’s one, full of detail and history. This poem has none of that. Li mentions one place name, then points out that Chu is not as mountainous as Sichuan, and the river… flows off somewhere. The local detail he discovers include: the moon still reflects on water here; and clouds make funny shapes sometimes. (One Chinese commentator earnestly informs me that you get more cumulus clouds down in Hubei.) This is hardly platinum travelogue.
The second thing is that the title seems to mean something. One Qing Dynasty literary critic imperiously declared: “He’s not saying goodbye to anyone! The word ‘parting’ can be removed from the title.” But of course, there is a goodbye in the poem. The notion of “sending someone off” - riding out a little way with them to say goodbye as they begin a long journey - is crucial. What this poem seems to be is a play on the parting poem, and it’s a lovely play that implies six different kinds of irony at once.
First, Li is making a simple geographical joke. He says nothing about getting off the boat, so why is there a parting from the river? He’s parting from *his* river - the Yangtze in Shu. At this border crossing, the Shu Yangtze is handing him over to the Chu Yangtze. It’s kinda the same as the joke: Why can you only chase a bear halfway into the woods? Because once you get halfway, you’re chasing it out of the woods. Why can the hometown stream only see him to Jingmen? Because after Jingmen it’s a different beast, the middle reaches of the long river.
Second, he’s telling us that he really does miss his hometown. Even though he’s staying on the same river, he will miss that stretch that he knows well. When he looks at what’s ahead of him, it is with some apprehension: he sees wild plains and yonder blue swallowing up the mountains and rivers that he grew up on.
Third, he leaves us wondering why there isn’t in fact anyone seeing him off. Do his family and friends not care enough? Is he so bold that he scorns such expressions of care from real people? By raising the possibility of someone seeing him off, Li gives meaning to the absence of that someone.
Here’s Cinix with a reading in reconstructed Tang Chinese. Note the consistent rhyme: the miracle of these poems is that Li packs all that meaning into a piece with perfect rhyme and meter (for what it’s worth, this one is in “regulated verse,” which means it follows additional metrical patterns that poets of the Han Dynasty never had to deal with).