Page:The works of Li Po - Obata.djvu/44

 Li Po the Chinese Poet who were successively married to Li Po. Of his several poems extant, addressed to his "wife," it is difficult to tell just which one is meant in each case. From a poem written to his children we learn that the girl's name was Ping-yang, and the son whom Wei Hao refers to by the unusual nickname of the "Boy of the Bright Moon," was called Po-chin. Of the third child, Po-li, mentioned by Wei Hao, there is no reference elsewhere. Po-chin died without having obtained any official appointment in 793. His one son wandered away from home; while his two daughters were married to peasants.

Although Li Po had expressed his desire of making the Green Hill at a short distance southeast of Taiping-fu his last resting place, he was buried at the "East Base" of the Dragon Hill. His kinsman, Li Hua, wrote the inscription on his tombstone. Twenty-nine years after the poet's death a governor of Tang-tu set up a monument. But by the second decade of the ninth century when another great poet, Po Chu-i, came to visit the grave, he found it in the grass of a fallow field. About the same time Fan Chuan-cheng, inspector of these districts, discovered the "burial mound three feet high, fast crumbling away"; he located the two grandaughters of Li Po among the peasantry, and on learning the true wish of the poet, removed the grave to the north side of the Green Hill and erected two monuments in January of 818.

IV

The Old Book of Tang says that Li Po "possessed a superior talent, a great and tameless spirit, and fantastical

See No. 63 [18]