Understated parting

From an unusually sincere Li Bai

The Departure of a Friend
Li Bai 

Blue in the north
Crystal east
The mountains range
And the river streams
At the city wall
Where we part
You break away
Like tumbleweed
For a thousand miles
You’ll float like cloud
The sinking sun
Feels the same as me
Give a parting wave
Hear a final neigh
The mustang roams
Solitary

李白  送友人
青山横北郭，白水绕东城。
此地一为别，孤蓬万里征。
浮云游子意，落日故人情。
挥手自兹去，萧萧班马鸣。

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Another parting poem, and an excellent companion for the last piece by Wang Wei. Reading these, you really get the sense that parting was a huge theme in Tang lives, because they explored this theme in such great detail, and used it to explore new poetic approaches.

With our phones and email today, it’s perhaps a bit of an alien theme. (Though I wonder if the fact that I live a very very long way away from my birth family has contributed to my liking for Tang poems?) But Li Bai makes it connect. With a series of natural metaphors, and the pathos of the final whinny, he places us firmly in his shoes, even though we don’t know where he was, or who he was bidding farewell to.

Interestingly, I don’t feel any of Li Bai’s usual archness in this poem. There’s generally a sense of irony and detachment in his writing, but this piece seems entirely heartfelt. He lived a long way away from his family, too, and perhaps he experienced these emotions acutely.

Cinix has a reconstructed pronunciation reading: