Song of the bright moon

The paper ” Song of the Bright Moon” is a wonderful example of an assignment on literature. Why do poets write poetry? For many different reasons. But in the case of the poets of the Southern Dynasties, they often wrote in order to dramatize events such as signing and dancing, and transformative romance. These features often characterize poetry from the Southern Dynasties and are especially true about the poem “ Song of the Bright Moon” by the poet Bao Zhao. The sensual world is clearly extremely important for Bao Zhao. In this poem he talks about entrancing women; he describes their hair and bodies, what they are wearing. He places these women in historical context, comparing them to Lady Wei and Zhao Fei-yan. These appear to have been famous courtesans. He is able to take his present, almost overwhelming romantic feeling and step outside of it a bit to set it in its place in history, to compare it to something beyond the immediate moment. Why exactly is Bao Zhao writing this poem? Toward the end, as the song “ Bright Moon” is being sung, he writes,
As the wine takes effect, the face relaxes;
the voice is gentle, the heart made known.

A thousand gold pieces don’t matter-
what counts is the strength of feeling.
We get a sense of how powerful his romantic feeling is. The cares of the world drop away, “ the face relaxes,” not even commerce and money—things for which everyone struggle—have any consequence as he watches the women. He realizes that feeling is all that counts. What makes this an interesting poem is how timeless it is. It could have been writing in almost any country, or even in the 19th century by the Romantics.