Li Bai drinks alone

No. 4: the history lesson

Drinking Alone in the Moonlight (4)

Li Bai

.

Sorrows come in battalions

wine in three hundred cups

Yuan Shao wanted Zheng Xuan drunk

300 toasts later, he was still standing up

The sorrows have the numbers

but the wine can stop them up

That's why when a lord is as drunk as a lord

he's happy in his cups

You can starve to death on Shouyang

as when the Shang Empire was beaten

The righteous brothers Yi and Qi

said the victor's crops must not be eaten

So you can starve to death on Shouyang

or you can hunger like poor Yan Hui

Confucius' most brilliant student

so poor and so young when he died

But they didn't enjoy their drinking

reputations are a waste of time

With crab all drinks are nectar

a pairing Bi Zhuo demanded

And we draw this drunken official

with crab claw and cup, two-handed

So with crab all drinks are nectar

for paradise, stack brew dregs to the sky

Though the dreg heaps by King Zhou's wine lake

weren't a heavenly Mount Penglai

His gluttony and forest of kebabs

drained his poor country dry

Just drink the sweet wine and pass out

on a rooftop, in the moonlight, so high

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This great series of drinking poems by Li Bai (701-762) includes two that perfectly embody the ambivalence and irony that define his style. The last in the series takes a different approach to the highly personal (1) and (3). Li takes the opportunity to show off his historical chops with a series of allusions designed to slow the reading of the poem, and invite the reader to savour them. There is heretical sneering at the disciples of Confucius and at traditional moral heroes; references to famous drinkers; and a reflection on the perils of over-indulgence. Li is still working through his contradictory and unresolved feelings about drinking, but now deploying cultural myths to help link his own emotions into the shared tradition.

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李白  月下独酌 其四

穷愁千万端，美酒三百杯。

愁多酒虽少，酒倾愁不来。

所以知酒圣，酒酣心自开。

辞粟卧首阳，屡空饥颜回。

当代不乐饮，虚名安用哉。

蟹螯即金液，糟丘是蓬莱。

且须饮美酒，乘月醉高台。