静夜思靜夜思

The most famous poem in Chinese — moonlight, homesickness, four simple lines every child knows.

chuáng床qián前míng yuè明月guāng光，

yí疑shì是dì shang地上shuāng霜。

jǔ举tóu头wàng望míng yuè明月，

dī tóu低头sī思gù xiāng故乡。

Line by line

床前明月光， Before my bed, the bright moonlight —
疑是地上霜。 I take it for frost on the ground.
举头望明月，舉頭望明月， I raise my head to gaze at the bright moon,
低头思故乡。低頭思故鄉。 I lower it, longing for home.

The poet & the story

Li Bai (701–762), the “Banished Immortal”, is the most celebrated poet of the Tang dynasty — a wandering, wine-loving romantic who spent most of his life far from home. He wrote this quatrain while travelling, probably in his mid-twenties at an inn in present-day Yangzhou. It is the first poem most Chinese children ever memorize.

Interpretation

Moonlight falls before the bed, so bright the poet mistakes it for frost — a single image that makes the night cold and lonely. He raises his head to the moon, the one thing he and his distant family can both see, then lowers it, sinking into homesickness. The whole arc of longing happens in one small movement of the head.