There is a very ancient and honorable homosexual literary tradition in China, and gay love poems are contained in the country’s earliest surviving anthology. Most gay men fulfilled their kinship interests (still the major factor in Chinese life today) by getting married, but they also maintained romantic homosexual affairs. The two major tropes for homosexual love – “sharing peaches”, and “the passion of the cut sleeve” – come from the story of Mizi Xia who gave a half-eaten peach to his lover Duke Ling of Wei (534–493 BC), and the story of how the Emperor Ai (reigned 6 BC to 1 AD) cut off his sleeve rather than wake his sleeping favorite Dong Xian. These ancient images demonstrate that male-to-male love rather than just sex was important for establishing a specifically gay identity, and how imaginative metaphors are at least as important as pejortive labels. For two hundred years the Han Dynasty was ruled by ten openly bisexual emperors, and detailed biographies were written about their favorites. During the Tang Dynasty, more records survive describing gay life and romantic friendship outside of imperial circles. The Chinese poet Bo Juyi (772–846) was one of the scholar-officials who served in the vast Chinese civil service, and became Governor of Suchow in 825. His fellow bureaucrats often were sent to provincial towns in the widespread empire, and he exchanged with them poems or verse-letters which are full of the expressions of romantic love. To his friend Qian Hui he sent a poetic souvenir of one winter night they spent together. His friend Yu Shunzhi sent him a bolt of patterned purple silk as a token of remembrance, and Bo Juyi replied how he would make this gift a symbol of their friendship. His greatest love was his fellow student Yuan Zhen (779–831). They were both Collators of Texts in the Palace Library at the northern imperial city of Ch’ang-an, and they exchanged intimate poetry for several decades when different careers separated them and Yuan Zhen was sent to the eastern city of Lo-yang. Bo Juyi wrote to his beloved,

Who knows my heart as I think of you?
It’s a captive falcon and a caged crane.

Even after a long separation – they both became commissioners in different provinces, and it could take almost a year for their letters to reach one another – Bo Juyi would sometimes dream that they were still together:

Awakening, I suspected you were at my side,
reached for you but there was nothingness.

Both poets got married; Yuan Zhen loved his wife but she died after only a few years; Bo Juyi’s wife “read no books” and he seems to have had no special intimacy with her; he built a cottage near a monastery where he would go to be alone. In his poem “Night Rain” (812) Bo Juyi speaks of his longing for Yuan Zhen:

There is one that I love in a far, far land;
There is something that harrows me, tied in the depths of my heart.
So Far is the land that I cannot visit him;
I can only gaze in longing, day on day.
So deep the sorrow that it cannot be torn away;
Never a night but I brood on it, hour, by hour.

In 814 Bo Juyi sent Yuan Zhan a sum of money equivalent to half a year’s salary,

Not that I thought you were bent on food and clothes,
But only because I felt tenderly towards you.

They were reunited briefly in 819, when both carved a poem on the rock outside a cave; they met again in 821–2 and in 829. The two men had made a pact to live together as Taoist recluses in their retirement, but Yuan Zhen died after a sudden illness before this plan could be put into effect. Bo Juyi wrote two formal dirges to recite at his beloved’s funeral and three songs for the pall-bearers to sing.

BO JUYI TO QIAN HUI     [early ninth century]

Night deep – the memorial draft finished;
mist and moon intense piercing cold.
About to lie down, I warm the last remnant of the wine;
we face before the lamp and drink.
Drawing up the green silk coverlets,
placing our pillows side by side;
like spending more than a hundred nights,
to sleep together with you here.

BO JUYI TO YU SHUNZHI

Thousand leagues, friend’s heart cordial;
one strand, fragrant silk purple resplendent.
Breaking the seal, it glistens
with a rose hue of the sun at eve –
The pattern fills in the width
of a breeze arising on autumnal waters.
About to cut it to make a mattress,
pitying the breaking of the leaves;
about to cut it to make a bag,
pitying the dividing of the flowers.
It is bettter to sew it,
making a coverlet of joined delight;
I think of you as if I’m with you,
day or night.

BO JUYI TO YUAN ZHEN     [805]

Since I left home to seek official state
Seven years I have lived in Ch’ang-an.
What have I gained? Only you, Yuan;
So hard it is to bind friendship fast. . . .
We did not go up together for Examination;
We were not serving in the same Department of State.
The bond that joined us lay deeper than outward things;
The rivers of our souls spring from the same well!

YUAN ZHEN TO BO JUYI     [816]

Other people too have friends that they love;
But ours was a love such as few friends have known.
You were all my sustenance; it mattered more
To see you daily than to get my morning food.
And if there was a single day when we did not meet
I would sit listless, my mind in a tangle of gloom.
To think we are now thousands of miles apart,
Lost like clouds, each drifting on his far way!
Those clouds on high, where many winds blow,
What is their chance of ever meeting again?
And if in open heaven the beings of the air
Are driven and thwarted, what of Man below?

BO JUYI TO YUAN ZHEN

Last night the clouds scattered everywhere,
for a thousand leagues the same moon color.
At dawn’s coming I saw you in dreams;
it must be you were thinking of me.
In my dream I grasped your hand,
asked you what your thoughts were.
You said you thought of me with pain,
had no one to send a letter through.

When I awoke, I still had not spoken in reply.
a knock-on-the-door sound, rap rap!
Saying, “A messenger from Shangzhou,”
he delivered a letter of yours.
From the pillow I rose sudden and startled,
putting on my clothes topsy-turvy.
I opened the seal, saw the hand-letter,
one sheet, thirteen lines.

SOURCE: Trans. Howard S. Levy, Translations from Po Chü-i’s Collected Works, 4 vols. (repr. New York, 1971); and Arthur Walley, The Life and Times of Po Chü-i (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1949).

The Rainbow

My heart leaps up when I behold
   A Rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
   Or let me die!
The Child is father of the man;
And I wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

William Wordsworth

My Heart Leaps Up, also known as The Rainbow, is a poem by the British Romantic Poet William Wordsworth. Noted for its simplicity of structure and language, it describes the joy that he feels when he sees a rainbow and notes that he has felt this way since his childhood. He concludes the poem by noting how his childhood has shaped his current views and stating that “the child is father of the man.”

Wordsworth wrote “My Heart Leaps Up” on the night of March 26, 1802. Earlier that day, he wad written “To The Cuckoo”. He was in Dove Cottage, Grasmere with his wife, Mary. After he wrote it he often thought about altering it, but decided to leave it as it was originally written. It was published as part of Poems in Two Volumes in 1807.

The day after he wrote “My Heart Leaps Up” Wordsworth began to write his larger and better known Ode: Intimations of Immortality. The last three lines from “My Heart Leaps Up” are used as an epigraph to Intimations of Immortality. Some scholars have noted that “My Heart Leaps Up” indicates Wordsworth’s state of mind while writing the larger poem and provide clues to its interpretation.

Some commentators have speculated that Wordsworth felt such joy because the rainbow indicates the constancy of his connection to nature throughout his life. Others have said that it celebrates “the continuity in Wordsworth’s consciousness of self.” Many commentators also draw parallels to the rainbow of Noah and the covenant that it symbolized. Wordsworth’s use of the phrase “bound each to each” in the poem also implies the presence of a covenant. Some commentators have drawn further parallels with the story of Noah. Harold Bloom has suggested that Wordsworth casts the rainbow as a symbol of the survival of his poetic gift, just as the rainbow symbolised to Noah the survival of mankind. Bloom suggests that Wordsworth’s poetic gift relied on his ability to recall the memories of his joy as a child.

William Wordsworth

On April 7, 1770, William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, Cumbria, England. Wordsworth’s mother died when he was eight–this experience shapes much of his later work. Wordsworth attended Hawkshead Grammar School, where his love of poetry was firmly established and, it is believed, he made his first attempts at verse. While he was at Hawkshead, Wordsworth’s father died leaving him and his four siblings orphans. After Hawkshead, Wordsworth studied at St. John’s College in Cambridge and before his final semester, he set out on a walking tour of Europe, an experience that influenced both his poetry and his political sensibilities. While touring Europe, Wordsworth came into contact with the French Revolution. This experience as well as a subsequent period living in France, brought about Wordsworth’s interest and sympathy for the life, troubles and speech of the “common man”. These issues proved to be of the utmost importance to Wordsworth’s work. Wordsworth’s earliest poetry was published in 1793 in the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. While living in France, Wordsworth conceived a daughter, Caroline, out of wedlock; he left France, however, before she was born. In 1802, he returned to France with his sister on a four-week visit to meet Caroline. Later that year, he married Mary Hutchinson, a childhood friend, and they had five children together. In 1812, while living in Grasmere, they grieved the loss of two of their children, Catherine and John, who both died that year.

Equally important in the poetic life of Wordsworth was his 1795 meeting with the poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was with Coleridge that Wordsworth published the famous Lyrical Ballads in 1798. While the poems themselves are some of the most influential in Western literature, it is the preface to the second edition that remains one of the most important testaments to a poet’s views on both his craft and his place in the world. In the preface Wordsworth writes on the need for “common speech” within poems and argues against the hierarchy of the period which valued epic poetry above the lyric.

Wordsworth’s most famous work, The Prelude (1850), is considered by many to be the crowning achievement of English romanticism. The poem, revised numerous times, chronicles the spiritual life of the poet and marks the birth of a new genre of poetry. Although Wordsworth worked on The Prelude throughout his life, the poem was published posthumously. Wordsworth spent his final years settled at Rydal Mount in England, travelling and continuing his outdoor excursions. Devastated by the death of his daughter Dora in 1847, Wordsworth seemingly lost his will to compose poems. William Wordsworth died at Rydal Mount on April 23, 1850, leaving his wife Mary to publish The Prelude three months later.