—Wenyi Luo
Li Po’s Drinking Alone in the Moonlight is a great work. One of the qualities making for a great work is that the work is worth reading repeatedly hundreds of times in one’s life, and each time, it brings people different insights and thoughts. Furthermore, the sentences in it can accurately describe their feelings which they might know, but cannot say by themselves. Until people have similar experiences in the real life, they will suddenly understand it. However, due to the cultural differences, lots of American people cannot fully understand the feeling Li Po has in this poem. Therefore, I would like to provide some of my own opinion to help.
This poem is written at the beginning of Tian Bao year, the most booming time. Li Po is summoned by the emperor at that time. And due to his excellent talent in poetry, the emperor only wants to drink wine with him but doesn’t want to offer him any official title. He feels quite lonely and angry since nobody understands his aspiration, and he can only talk to the moon. Therefore, he writes “dinking with moon” to show his loneliness. However, the emotion is far beyond just loneliness, which is more about the indignant feelings of his unrecognized talents and unfulfilled great aspirations to help poor people.
Li Po is lonely but also proud. In the poem, there are three stages in the poem. Li Po uses his rich imagination to express the complex feelings from loneliness to not feeling lonely, then back to loneliness, and finally from loneliness to not feeling loneliness again. At the beginning, Li Po is lonely because there is only him sitting in the flowers with wine. And then, he invites the moon to drink and dances with his shadows. At this time, he has the moon, flowers, wine and his aspirations to accompany him. Nevertheless, at the end, everything separates, which shows the previous scenery is so ironic and he is extremely lonely under this contrast. After he is awake, he wishes, “I hope that one day we three will meet again, deep in the Milky Way”. He goes beyond the life and death to become a god, which is regarded as detachment or transcending worldliness in Daoism. It is because he could not realize his aspiration of helping the world that he chooses to entrust the emotions to the moon. The emotion is helpless or lonely, but more accurately, it is proud because he is not subject to the world’s rules.
I was in elementary school when I read this poem for the first time. I was too young to understand his helplessness and generous-mind. But now I have the same feeling with him because I work as a volunteer for 2020 Census and I want to do something for Chinese people. I try to persuade them to fill out the form and tell them lots of advantages about it, while some people just don’t trust me. The reason they give is so ridiculous, that they are too tired to fill out the form. However, if there are not enough Chinese people making these excuses, the resources and services will not be provided for Chinese people anymore. Although they learn about this, they still reject and tell me that they will figure it out when there is nothing for them. At that time, I feel so angry, helpless and lonely, but I could not tell anyone or do anything, which is the same feeling in this poem. Until I had this similar experience, I finally realized that I love the poem so much and really appreciate that it can describe my feeling accurately.
