Li Po and Wallace Stevens

I came across this poem a few years ago, Alone Looking at the Mountain by the classical Chinese poet Li Po.

Alone Looking at the Mountain

All the birds have flown up and gone;
A lonely cloud floats leisurely by.
We never tire of looking at each other -
Only the mountain and I.

For some reason I find myself frequently going over it in my head, line by line. For me at least, its a four line meditation that I can't help but get sucked into. The first two lines quite nicely portray an occurence anyone can imagine, there go the birds, and there go the clouds, and then there is this moment in the last two lines that both defies and defines groundedness. I wonder if the mountain and Li Po are still looking at each other, they would have to be because they never tire. But of course we know that Li Po drowned trying to embrace the moon's reflection in the water. For me, at least, the resonance is the moment that is not now, back when, or yet to be, its just Li Po and the mountain.

I found a great website called poet seers that includes Li Po's poetry, and for those visual thinkers, photos that correspond. There was one for Alone Looking at the Mountain, but I'll leave it out, because I already had an idea of the mountain in my mind, as well as the moment when he may have written the poem.

Unfortunately I could not find Rilke on the page, but I did find Wallace Stevens, who I think is by far the best writer to have come from 20th Century America besides Kurt Vonnegut.



Like Li Po, he has a humble appreciation of a moment that both defies and defines what it means to be grounded. For Stevens, I imagine, he may have been looking out at a Pine in the middle of a January blizzard from his study window when he wrote Snow Man, another of those moments where there is a fluidity of being between humanity and the world.

Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.