TAO QIAN (365 or 372-427)

Daoist poet Tao Qian (also known as Tao Yuanming) is equally famous for his prose "Preface to the Poem on the Peach Blossom Spring" and for his remarkable poems celebrating a return to nature and an epicurian love of wine. He lived in a time of great political instability known as the Six Dynasties period (222 589) and his work expresses the anxiety and weariness that this time produced. He went through a sucession of official posts, working as a military advisor and a magistrate, but was unsatisfied with this life and retired to the country where he lived out his remaining years as a farmer. His work reflects this life: he is primarily known as a poet of nature, China's first great landscape poet, and in his work an opposition develops between nature's purity and simplicity (exemplified by his own self representation as a farmer sage) and the "dusty" world of the court and the marketplace: "After all those years like a beast in a cage / I've come back to the soil again." Like Thoreau in his beanfield for the American literary tradition, Tao Yuanming came to represent for later Chinese poets the quintessential model of the official who has escaped "the world's net" for a life closer to spiritual values, and countless later poets (notably Wang Wei) echo his lines when they write about the country life. In his own time, however, he was not appreciated. The dominant mode of poetry in his day was flowery and artificial. The great poets of the Tang and Song Dynasties, however, came to treasure Taos poetry for its measured simplicity, its lack of adornment, and for its conscious use of common words. Around 130 of his poems survive.
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from Twenty Poems on Drinking Wine


1
Neither decline nor glory can last forever,
they are tied up with each other.
Shao Ping worked in the watermelon fields
wishing he were still the duke of Dongling.
Winter and summer come by turns.
The Way of life is also like that.
A wise man understands the essence,
he has no doubt about it.
Please give me a cup of wine fast--
I'll hold it merrily as the sun dies out.
 

2
It is said good deeds will be rewarded
but consider Yi and Su in the Western Mountains.
Good or evil, expect no reward,
Why should one spout such empty words?
Rong tied his clothes with a rope at ninety,
Suffering more hunger and cold than when young.
Yet there is integrity in poverty:
a hundred generations will know their names.

        ---Translated by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping