Page:The works of Li Po - Obata.djvu/40

 Li Po the Chinese Poet and prodigal career of the poet at the court. Kao Li-shih, the powerful eunuch, who had heen greatly humiliated by having been ordered to pull off Li Po's shoes once as the latter became drunk at the palace, persuaded Yang Kuei-fei that the poet had intended a malicious satire in his poem by comparing her with Lady Flying Swallow, who was a famous court beauty of the Han dynasty, but who was unfaithful and never attained the rank of empress. This was enough to turn gratitude to venomous hate, and Yang Kuei-fei interfered whenever the emperor sought to appoint the poet to office. There is another tradition that Li Po incurred the displeasure of Hsuan Tsung through the intrigue of a fellow courtier. This story is also plausible. Li Po was not the sort of man fitted for the highly artificial life of the court, where extreme urbanity, tact and dissimulation, were essential to success. He soon expressed a desire to return to the mountains; and the emperor presented him with a purse and allowed him to depart. He was then forty-five years old, and had sojourned in the capital for three years.

Once more Li Po took to the roads. He wandered about the country for ten years, "now sailing one thousand li in a day, now tarrying a whole year at a place, enjoying the beauty thereof." He went up northeast to Chinan-fu of Shantung to receive the Taoist diploma from the "high heavenly priest of Pei-hai." He journeyed south and met Tsui Tsung-chi, the handsome Immortal of the Wine-cup, who had been banished from the capitol and was an official at the city of Nanking. The old friendship was renewed, and withal the glad old time. It is related that one moonlight night they took a river journey down the Yangtze from Tsai-hsi [14]