Poetry Appreciation: Quiet Night Thoughts

Today we are going to enjoy a very famous poem by Li Bai, "Quiet Night Thoughts".

Bright moonlight in front of the bed, suspected of frost on the ground.

Look up at the bright moon and look down at your hometown.

Li Bai was the greatest romantic poet of the Tang Dynasty, revered as a "poetry immortal", and his poetry had a very profound impact on later generations, and was called "Li Du" together with Du Fu, the "poet saint".

Li Bai is bold and generous, likes to make friends, likes to travel around, and likes to drink, he has a lot of strange imagination, and he is very unrestrained and emotionally warm.

Li Bai was talented and intelligent from an early age, and he had already written many very powerful ancient poetry works when he was a teenager. He also likes to learn swordsmanship, so he is quite chivalrous, which adds a lot of charm to himself and his works.

Li Bai loved the great rivers and mountains of the motherland, and since the age of twenty-four, he has left his hometown to travel everywhere, and his footprints have almost all over the north and south of the great river, and he has written many poems praising the famous mountains and rivers in his lifetime. The poem "Quiet Night Thoughts" was created during the first year of Tang Xuanzong's reign, when Li Bai was twenty-six years old, and was written at an inn in Yangzhou. The so-called "quiet night thinking" is the thoughts generated in the quiet of the night. On a night when there were few stars in the month, Li Bai looked up at the bright moon, perhaps because he imagined that the family who stayed in his hometown did not know whether they were also admiring the bright moon at this time, and homesickness arose, so he wrote this poem that praised the ages.

In just four short verses, the gist of the poem is this: bright moonlight sprinkled in front of the bed through the window paper, and in a trance, it seems that a layer of white frost has spread on the ground. I couldn't help but look up at the bright moon in the sky outside the window, and I couldn't help but look down and meditate, thinking of my hometown in the distance.

Li Bai's poetry has always been heroic and unrestrained as the main style, but this "Quiet Night Thought" is written very fresh and simple. He vividly wrote out his thoughts about his hometown in plain words.