The Hidden Glimmering: Solitude, Wilderness, and the Divine in Early Medieval Irish Poetry and the Poetry of Li Bai

The Hidden Glimmering: Solitude, Wilderness, and the Divine in Early Medieval Irish Poetry and the Poetry of Li Bai James Harpur (bio) In a lecture given at the turn of the millennium, Seamus Heaney pointed out the resemblance between certain early medieval Irish poems and the work of Japanese haiku masters such as Basho, Issa, and Buson.1 The poems of both cultures, Heaney suggested, celebrated nature through small epiphanies that contained no superfluous self-reflection by their authors and required no teasing out by their readers. One of the Irish poems he had in mind was a short anonymous lyric about a blackbird sending out its song from its yellow beak across Loch Loígh. In its small-scale focus, its sudden movement of sound, and its pictorial brilliance, the poem has a natural kinship with haiku—such as Basho’s famous frog plopping into the ancient pond, or Issa’s snail slowly climbing Mount Fuji. It seems remarkable, on the face of it, that early medieval Irish “hermit poets” and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japanese poets should be able to find common ground. Although poetry written in pursuit of ultimate truth can break free from the gravity of particular centuries, nevertheless, culture, religion, language, and other factors remain tenacious conditioning elements for any writer. Surely the Christian faith, in the case of the anonymous Irish poets, and Buddhism in its Zen form, in the case of the Japanese poets, would have ensured a radical difference between the outlooks of the two groups? After all, sin-conscious, penance-ridden medieval Christianity lies at the other end of the religious spectrum from Zen Buddhism, with its emphasis on meditation and meditative ritual, heightened awareness, and satori, or sudden enlightenment. The following, then, is a brief consideration of how religion may shape the perspective or vision, and style, of poets of two different cultures and eras, along with their relationship to nature and themselves. Instead of revisiting Heaney’s [End Page 120] ground and matching the Irish poems with those of the Japanese haiku masters, I will compare them with poems written by a poet from another Buddhist-influenced culture, and from a historical epoch much closer in time to that of the Irish poets: the eighth-century Chinese poet Li Bai.2 Along with his fellow Tang dynasty poets Du Fu and Wang Wei, Li Bai was one of China’s greatest classical writers. All three Tang poets were indebted, to different degrees, to both China’s indigenous Daoist religion and Ch’an Buddhism, which was a precursor of Zen Buddhism (“Zen” is derived from “Ch’an”). Like their Irish counterparts, the Chinese poets wrote about solitude, nature, the life of the hermit, and spirituality. Li Bai himself was born in central Asia in 701. As a young man his literary gifts were soon recognized and, rejecting the security of the imperial civil service, he embraced a life of writing poetry. By the late 730s he had become an established writer who enjoyed nothing more than roaming around the country, savoring landscapes and solitary temples. A free spirit who drank from the current brew of Daoist and Ch’an ideas as much as from actual cups of wine, he nevertheless accepted, in 742, an appointment to be a court poet in the imperial capital of Ch’ang-an. Two years later, his unpredictable and often drunken behavior resulted in his dismissal; he resumed his nomadic life, barely restrained by his marriage to a second wife and the presence of a son and daughter. His last years were marked by poor health and experiencing the effects of civil war in China. He died in 762, his reputation as a great poet already secure. This essay will look at three poems by Li Bai and compare them with three anonymous Irish “hermit” poems (“Manchán’s Wish,” “King and Hermit,” and “The Hermit”) with the hope that common traits and differences will emerge. How much, for example, were the Irish poets constrained or inspired by a faith in which the monastic ideal was to reject the world and the senses in order to keep a right relationship with God? And how much...