Behind the Night Banquet and Exile: Forty-Seven Tang Poems

The Complete Tang Poems contains more than 48,900 poems in 900 magnificent volumes, like a Milky Way strewn with stars. Yet people usually gaze up at only a few of its brightest lights: Li Bai's moon, Du Fu's autumn wind, and Wang Wei's empty mountains. Deep in this river of stars lie countless unnamed lights: the bold verses Tang Taizong wrote while the blood at Xuanwu Gate was still wet; the yearning Wu Zetian secretly recited beneath the solitary lamp at Ganye Temple; the ornate compositions Zhang Changzong offered as a favored male companion; and the desolate quatrains Gao Lishi sighed over in exile. These poems, half-veiled by the dust of history, are like scattered bronze mirrors, reflecting the many faces of the Tang dynasty. In Li Shimin's words, "I calmly lay my hand upon my sword; must one save the world to win renown?" we see the ambition and restraint of a dynasty's founder. In Wu Zhao's "Tomorrow I shall visit the imperial garden; hurry and tell spring to arrive," we hear the forcefulness and caprice of an empress. Behind Shangguan Wan'er's regulated poem on "red plum blossoms defying the snow" lies the keen intelligence of a woman chancellor walking a tightrope amid the tangled forces of power. And in Zhao Gu's lines, "Where are the friends who came with me to enjoy the moon? The scenery seems just as it was last year," we hear the longing of a final-generation scholar shattered by the ravages of war.