Tao Yuanming, who we’ve already covered in a previous podcast, was not only a skilled prose writer but also a poet. In today’s podcast, we look at one of his most famous poems.
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- Jin Yong - Sword of the Yue Maiden April 27, 2024
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Great job once again, and today’s selected poem certainly is beautiful.
I think today’s podcast focused a little too much on Tao’s eight or nine room reference. As you two noted, Tao’s poem is pretty straightforward and simple – not many descriptions and qualifiers are provided. As such, we have no idea regarding the quality/size of these rooms. We also don’t know (or at least it wasn’t mentioned in the podcast, unless I missed it) what kind of place Tao was moving from. Perhaps before leaving for the bucolic life, he was living in a much larger/more extravagant place. Small numbers can seem big, and big numbers can seem small without context. Since Tao doesn’t provide these details, I’m not sure it is wise to project our own understanding of “eight or nine rooms” into Tao’s poem.
Do you have any sense if others during Tao’s time also decided to leave the city and/or their official posts? How common was that? In other words, what makes Tao most unique – the fact that he left his position in the first place, or that he had the talent to write beautifully about his decision?