Comparing three poems in the book The Rose of Time written by Bei Dao - Essay Example

In Bei Dao’s poetry, the presence of ‘nature’ is essentially affected and afflicted by the poet’s oppressed self; but since Bei Dao rarely mentions the reasons of his discomforted and distressed soul explicitly in his poems, his poems turn to be emblematic of some meta-reality. Unlike Du Fu, Li Po, and Wang Fei’s poetry, Bei Dao’s poetry does not have any pure philosophy of ‘Nature’. Though few remarks for “nature” from Du Fu and others’ poems come directly to clarify their philosophy and thoughts on Nature, it is obvious that nature, in most of their poems, appears to serve the purpose of a background that is vast, endless, somber and generous as Nature itself is.

Whereas Du Fu and other medieval poets’ “self” seek serenity and solace amid the vast and endless generosity of ‘nature’, Bei Dao’s ‘nature’ is enigmatic of the poet’s distressed present existence and, therefore, Du Fu’s nature envisions about untold but desired future. More or less directly the country landscape appears in Li Po and Wang Fei’s poems as a symbol of freedom where the choked ‘self’ takes the deep breath to be free of the contamination of spirit and body.

Mostly because of the prime concern of ‘nature’ with the spirituality of each of the two poets Wang Wei and Li Po, their presentation of ‘self’ in term of ‘nature’ is greatly spiritual. Unlike Wang Wei, and Li Po, Bei Dao’s presentation of ‘nature’ is affected by the poet’s current state. As a result, the mode of presentation changes from time to time in his poems. For an instance, in the poem “The Morning’s Story”, the “morning” is not any usual morning that the readers are accustomed to view in their daily life.

Rather the readers grow curious when they are informed that another “morning established by the violence of language/ has changed the morning” (“The Morning’s Story”). Again in the same poem, the