Pick two poets who seem to have nothing to do with each other — a Gothic American and a pastoral Englishman, say — and see where the catalogue actually joins them: overlapping years, shared ground, distinctive themes, and the poems that secretly rhyme.
Li Bai, also known as Li Bo, was born in 701 and died in 762, during the high and later Tang dynasty, the period most often celebrated as the great classical age of Chinese poetry. Few literary figures have become so inseparable from the imaginative idea of poetry itself. In China he is commonly called the “Immortal Poet,” and the phrase is more than a compliment to technical skill. It conveys the sense that his vers…
“Heaven and earth are the travellers’ inn of the myriad things; time is the passer-by of a hundred generations.”
Neighbourhood:
Classical & Ancient Poets, Classical Chinese Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Nature Poets
Francis William Bourdillon, born on 22 March 1852 and dead on 13 January 1921, occupies an unusual position in English literary history. He is remembered by many readers, often without recognition of his name, for a single exquisite lyric: “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes.” Its opening contrast—“The night has a thousand eyes, / And the day but one”—has passed into common literary memory, quoted in anthologies, schoolro…
Neighbourhood:
Love Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
About 5,606 km separate
Suyab, Kyrgyzstan from
Halton Road, Runcorn, Cheshire.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Li Bai:
suyab, tang dynasty, immortal poet, daoist ideas, yangtze region, emperor xuanzong, chang'an, xu yushi.
Francis William Bourdillon:
runcorn, the night has a thousand eyes, light, among the flowers, prince christian of schleswig-holstein, oxford, pierre de ronsard, lyric grace.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
