Cen Shen (715-770) was as well-known a frontier poet as Gao Shi, and the Poetry Of White Snow written in 754 was considered typical of his frontier poetry. The first four lines of the poetry describe snow on the frontier before the farewell, and the second couplet surpasses all the snow poems before it for [...]

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Tao Qian wrote this poem probably in the year 417 at the age of 53, after the old cottage he described in Return to Nature was burned up in a fire. Lines 5-6 of this poem are the best-known verse representative of the poet’s love of nature and free dam. The chrysanthemum, the last cold-proof [...]

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Tao Qian’s Return to Nature consists of five poems, of which the preceding one is the first and this is the third. The first describes the poet’s cottage and the third relates his rural life. There is nothing more prosaic than this simple rustic life from sunrise to sunset, yet Tao Qian makes it poetic [...]

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This poem was written in the spring of 757 when Du Fu was still a captive in the capital occupied by the rebels. In the first couplet we see the contrast between man and nature. The second line is antithetical: the city should be beautiful in spring but grass and weed overgrew in disorder. It [...]

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Du Fu wrote this poem in 736 at the age of twenty-four when he travelled in modern Shandong Province. The first couplet tells us his general impression of the Peak of Peaks viewed from afar: it was one boundless green overspreading the ancient States of Qi in the north and Lu in the south. When [...]

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Most scholars think this poem was written in 759 when the poet in exile, favored by a general amnesty, was on his way from White Emperor Town in modern Sichuan Province to Jiangling in modern Hubei Province. But, at variance with these scholars, I think this quatrain was written when the poet left home at [...]

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Wang Han (689 - 726)was a frontier poet though as secretary of Premier Zhang Yue he had never been to the frontier, This quatrain begins with the wine of grapes which was believed to have been imported from Greece during the reign of King Mu of the Zhou dynasty or Emperor Wu of the Han, [...]

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The first two stanzas of this poem are realistic, written in a simple and plain style and the third more imaginative, written in a picturesque style. In AD 207 Cao Cao (155 - 220), King of Wei State, who had unified northern China, came to the Rocky Hill, which is now situated 8 km north [...]

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Maybe you think this Chinese poetry is a narrative dealing with friendship, but most Chinese critics agree that this poem is a love song, opinions differ only as to whether the lover is a man or a woman.
The first two lines of the three stanzas describe the season when the reeds turned from green to [...]

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This is the first poem in the Book of Poetry (诗经) probably compiled in the sixth century B. C. It describes the life and love of Chinese people living about three thousand years ago. In the first stanza the method of association is used. That is to say, on hearing a pair of water-birds, the [...]

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