Poem: Li Ho (791-817)

[image source]

A Piece for Magic Strings
(A shamaness exorcises baleful creatures.)

On the western hills the sun sets, the eastern hills darken,
Horses blown by the whirlwind tread the clouds.
From coloured lute and plain pipes, crowded faint notes:
Her flowered skirt rustles as she steps in the autumn dust.
When the wind brushes the cassia leaves and a cassia seed drops
The blue raccoon weeps blood and the cold fox dies.
Dragons painted on the ancient wall with tails of inlaid gold
The God of Rain rides into the autumn pool;
And the owl a hundred years old, which changed to a goblin of the trees,
Hears the sound of laughter as green flames start up inside its nest.

This isn't your normal, calm, introspective Chinese poet. Li Ho was well-known in his lifetime and has never been fully forgotten, but he is seldom included in anthologies of T'ang poets. I found him in a old Penguin Classics collection called Poems of the Late T'ang (1965, British edition). The translater, A. C. H Graham suggests that Li Ho is related in his "morbid sensitivity" to the later French poet, Baudelaire. Certainly there is a similarity in the use of symbolic imagery that is unheard of in early Chinese poetry.

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