LI HE (791-817)

Li He was an unsuccessful scholar who, though he was distantly related to the imperial clan and was extremely talented, garnered only the lowest posts in his brief life of twenty-six years. Like Meng Jiao's poetry, Li He's work can be bitterly sarcastic and reflects the frustration he must have felt at the glass ceiling that impeded his career. In his 5th "Horse Poem," for example, he compares himself to a fine desert horse without an appropriate rider, and longs to be harnessed and directed by imperial (golden) reins. He also has a penchant for erotic, romantic, and even morbidly violent imagery, and his poems grate against the nerves with the shrieking of ghosts, weeping of flowers, and the burning of sinister fires. He was a Chinese Edgar Allen Poe, though a much better poet than Poe was, and like Poe his reputation suffered because literary culture couldn't stomach his unclassifiable and frankly weird works of genius. In his day, he was sponsored by the prominent poet and prose writer Han Yu, but he quickly disappeared from literary knowledge after his death, and only has had a comeback in the last two centuries. Two hundred and forty of his poems have survived the centuries of neglect, though a legend states that this is all that remains of a larger collection that was thrown into a toilet by his vindictive cousin.
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from Songs of the Twelve Months (Poems Written for the Henan Provincial Examination)

Poem 12: The Month of the Twelfth Moon

The sun's toes are fading, red in misty air
A thin frost remain unmelted under cassia trees
but a peaceful air seems to blow away winter's severity.
Long days are coming, farewell to long nights!

        ---Translated by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping