During his formative adventures, a twenty-something, swashbuckling Li Bai (701-761) traveled to what is now Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, in southeast China. His intention was to visit Yellow Crane Tower, a site sacred to Taoists, on the Yangtze River. He planned to write a poem about the view from the Tower and post it on a wall among the other poems hanging there. In Tang China, posting poems on the walls of buildings open to the public was a major form of “publication”—the best way for a young poet to gain recognition.
Before he finished his poem, however, Li discovered Cui Hao’s poem “Yellow Crane Tower” posted there. Three years Li’s junior, Cui had already passed the government-service exam, which included the composition of poetry. Li, bless his heart, refused ever to take it. Still, Cui was an established poet; Li was not. What’s more, Cui’s poem was in the seven-character lines of “regulated” verse that were popular at court, but not yet Li’s forte. The poem starts with an allusion to a local legend:
An old man drank regularly at a nearby tavern, never paid and just kept running a tab. Though the owner never pressured him to pay up, the old man one day painted, with an orange peel, a much larger than life-sized crane on the tavern wall, as if to settle his bill, and vanished. Subsequently, whenever patrons played instruments or sang in that tavern, the crane in the wall would dance by moving its wings in time to the music. This miraculous phenomenon made the establishment a tourist attraction, and the owner became rich. Some years later, the old man returned, summoned the crane from the wall and flew away on its back. Neither of them was ever seen in this world again.
Yellow Crane Tower
The yellow crane, spurred by an old man, took off and is gone.
When birds like that retire, they won’t be coming back again.
Emptiness and a sacred tower—they alone remain:
a thousand years of vagrant clouds rambling on and on.
Where clear, the river mirrors banks of lush, snug Ginkgo trees,
and Parrot Island shimmers with exceedingly green grass.
Which way is home? I want my home here in the sunset haze.
Nostalgia hurts. And so much surface: misty restlessness.
The hissy fit of jealousy Li threw when he read those lines is the stuff of legend. We are told that he ripped the poem he had started into pieces. A quatrain expressing his frustration has come down to us. Attributed to Li, it may well be later tradition writing what it felt he should have written. It certainly is in keeping with his character:
My fists are spoiling to reduce this holy tower to rubble.
My soles are hot to stomp that island down into the mud.
The poem that Cui Hao tossed off, posted there above my head,
is full of what I tried to get just right—but wasn’t able.
Beating Cui’s poem became, it seems, an obsession for Li. Over fifty of his subsequent poems refer to Yellow Crane Tower. He never let go of that early defeat.
Li Bai yet again "Drinking Alone by Moonlight."
I suppose, if one wanted, one could draw a “moral” from this story: Li went on to become the most popular and beloved of Chinese poets. Cui, in contrast, is comparatively minor, and comparatively little of his work has come down to us. Yes, individual failures here and there are of little consequence when one thinks of all the leaps and discoveries that occur in a poet’s career. Never despair, O poets: there is no fixed timeline for growth and revelation. Great poetry can come to the young, the middle-aged and the senescent.
That “lesson” is pretty good, but I find this other one more immediately helpful: a poet should be honest about other poets’ work and fully concede its power and beauty, however frustrating, even infuriating, that excellence might be to his or her self-estimation and ambitions. This often painful honesty about the greatness of others’ work, rooting and rankling in there wherever poetry comes from, is a tried-and-true way to push through into new worlds of possibilities and do what you have never done before.
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