Bai Juyi (772-846 AD) was a poet and politician during the rebuilding period of the Tang Empire, after the An Lushan Rebellion (755-763 AD) had divided it. He held a series of academic and tutorial positions at the imperial court before being exiled for, it seems, outshining his superiors with his talent. Recalled by a new regime, he held a number of minor posts and sinecures until he suffered a paralytic attack and lost his left leg. In his later years he cultivated Chan (Zen) Buddhism and came to call himself “The Hermit of Xiangshan” after the monastery in Henan Province where he resided among the Longmen Grottoes which to this day house many thousands of images of Shakyamuni Buddha and his disciples. Because the language of his poetry is accessible and the themes not esoteric, less educated people could easily understand it. Unlike the majority of the Tang poets, he was famous during his lifetime. 

“Returning Home,” with its movement from the objective to the subjective, is typical of Bai’s work. The opening three lines give us what his eyes see in order to establish setting and season. The closing three lines, in contrast, take place in his mind, in which drunkenness has created a homey warmth. A sort of Buddhist koan, “The Dream, The Spring,” by questioning the existence of what has not been empirically perceived, calls attention to the realm to which dreams, along with the unseen flowers and mist, belong. In “Prairie-grass,” after a set-up consisting of a six-line, vivid description of the resilient subject, the final couplet goes “poetic” with an apostrophe to an absent friend and the climactic personification of the grass as “sighing” for him, an expression of Bai’s own feelings. The four-line poem, “A Suggestion to Liu,” exhibits the companionable simplicity of Bai’s work. Friendship is a major theme in Tang poetry and, in this brief dramatic monologue, Bai does everything he can to tempt his friend Liu Shijiu inside for a drink so that he can enjoy his company. In “A Song of the Palace,” Bai presents a common situation in Tang poetry: an imperial concubine awake and waiting in vain for an emperor to visit her. The poem is explicitly called a “cí,” a form that originated in popular song and was adapted for literary purposes during the 700s AD.