Page:Frank Owen - The Scarlett Hill, 1941.djvu/239

RV 234 (LI PO) the sport. Never once did she fall. Perhaps the balance and rhythm she had learned in dancing helped her now.

She would not leave the hillside until the Emperor declared his feet were frozen and threatened to return to the Palace without her. That day marked the first occasion when she had ever been really friendly toward Li Po.

As months sped by, Li Po gave himself up to a career of poetry and dissipation, but nobody despised him for that. Did not even nuns frequently get tipsy and priests drown their worries in wine? It was an age in which intoxication was considered highly complimentary and officials who were physically unable to stand the strain of excessive drinking invariably hired substitutes to get drunk in their stead. The T'angs distinguished five types of intoxication:

"Wine may fly to the heart and produce maudlin emotions; or to the liver and incite pugnacity; or to the stomach and cause drowsiness; or to the lungs and induce hilarity; or to the kidneys and incite desire."

At some time or other Li Po had indulged in them all. Occasionally when he was drunk and his money exhausted, he wrote his best poems which he bartered in exchange for wine. Unlike Tu Fu, who wrought his poems with the study and care of a carver of fine jade, he dashed verses off by pure inspiration from the wellsprings of his traveler's mind. These immortalized RV 234 (234)