选择性必修一Unit 4 Li Bai and his romantic poetry
2023-10-07
网站类目：学科比赛情况
姓名：吴珊珊
所在单位：江苏省江阴市第一中学
获奖类别：无锡市优质课比赛
获奖级别：市级
获奖等级：
获奖时间：0000-00-00
评比部门：无锡市教育科学研究院
发表刊物：
刊物级别：国家级
发表时间：0000-00-00
Li Bai and
his romantic poetry
Extended reading
Read the essay on the life and works of the famous Chinese poet Li Bai.
A hundred feet the temple towers;
I can reach out for the stars in the sky.
But I dare not speak in a voice loud,
For fear of scaring dwellers on high.
(“A Night Stay at a Mountain Temple”)
It is believed that this poem was written by Li Bai in his teenage years. With striking
imagination in expressions like “scaring dwellers on high”, this early poem already
displayed signs of a romantic style, which was later to characterize Li Bai’s poetry.
Li Bai’s love of reading and travelling from an early age contributed to his romantic
style. He started studying the classics when he was only five years old, and was
reading ancient philosophers of different schools at the age of ten, including
Confucianism and Taoism. By reading books of all kinds, from legends to
historical stories, he familiarized himself with classical Chinese culture, and more
importantly, he acquired the wisdom of previous generations.
Driven by a burning desire for adventure and travel, Li Bai left home and started to
travel around in his early twenties. His footsteps covered almost the whole country.
During his travels, he visited famous mountains and great rivers, encountering
different customs and practices. These travelling experiences also nourished his love
of nature and inspired him to write numerous poems in the romantic style.
Li Bai’s romantic style was also deeply rooted in the social and historical context
in which he lived. Li Bai grew up in the most glorious period of the Tang Dynasty, a time of economic boom and social stability. This open and tolerant atmosphere
allowed Li Bai the liberty to develop a free and unconstrained personality, which, in
turn, had a huge impact on his poetic production.
Given his personal experiences and the historical background, it is only natural
to see that the majority of Li Bai’s poems are characterized by the romantic style.
Even the most uninformed reader would not fail to be impressed by the poet’s rich
imagination. The moon and stars in the sky, the natural landscape and the figures
in legends all become a vehicle for his imagination. Equally impressive is Li Bai’s
free expression of strong feelings, which breathes vitality into the lifeless objects he
describes, and which distinguishes him from other landscape poets. These features
are inseparable from Li Bai’s wide use of exaggeration, metaphor and other artistic
techniques. The poem below, written in his fifties, is representative of his romantic
style:
My silver hair is three thousand feet long,
Because my sorrow is deep and strong.
How can the autumn frost white
Be cast into the mirror bright?
(“Autumn Frost”)
With his extraordinary imagination, free expression of strong feelings and mastery
of language, Li Bai is widely recognized as the greatest romantic poet after Qu Yuan.
Generations of poets, both in China and abroad, owe a debt to his inspirational
poems. One such poet is Ezra Pound, a 20th-century American poet. He was
fascinated by Li Bai’s poems and translated some of them in his 1915 poetry
collection entitled Cathay. Today Li Bai’s poetry continues to be enjoyed by
countless readers around the world.
A Write a summary of the essay on Li Bai’s life and poetry.
B Analyse the following poem by Li Bai to find out more about his romantic style.
Leaving the White Emperor Town at Dawn
Leaving at dawn the White Emperor crowned with cloud,
I’ve sailed a thousand miles through canyons in a day.
With monkeys’ sad adieus the riverbanks are loud;
My skiff has left ten thousand mountains far away.
(Translated by Xu Yuanchong)
附件：