In 744, two years after serving as Special Imperial Poet Laureate, Li Bai left the court and spent most of the next decade wandering in eastern and southeastern China. When the An-Lushan Rebellion broke out in 755, Li Bai unwittingly became involved in a power struggle between the Crown Prince and his younger brother, Prince Yong. Joining Prince Yong’s camp as an advisor, Li Bai faced conviction and exile after Yong’s defeat but was ultimately granted an imperial pardon en route to banishment.
Down and out thereafter, Li Bai drifted and depended on the kindness of one patron to the other. Though homeless, childless, and penniless, however, the old man was not a bit less of a youthful and hopeful bon-vivant at heart, as he always had been, and his poems’ essence of insouciance and force. In the poems he composed during these final years, he imagined himself returning happily to his native home in the sky, or returning to Nothingness, even for just a brief moment, and going on singing about Nature and a life of freedom in adamant defiance against old age, despair, pain, and the imminent darkness.
Clearly, Courage is the guiding spirit of Li Bai which is reflected in these selected poems…