Things We Carry on the Sea

“Thoughts on a Still Night” by Li Bai (744-756)

Li Bai is an essential figure in Tang Dynasty poetry and is likely the best-known traditional Chinese poet in the West. His works are widely learned and memorized by children in the Chinese school system. The poem translated here as “Thoughts on a Still Night” is his most famous work. Li Bai’s poem evokes feelings of displacement and homesickness similar to those in Ping’s “Things We Carry on the Sea.”

“Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman (1892)

Walt Whitman’s original 1855 publication of Leaves of Grass was a turning point in American poetry. An innovator in the lyric voice and free-verse forms, Whitman’s work carves the way for an American poetic identity. Whitman’s use of repetition and anaphora (See: Literary Devices) helps establish a bold, declarative voice that foreshadows many later American poets. Ping’s use of repeated, declarative sentences owes a debt to Whitman and “Song of Myself.”

“We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks (1960)

Gwendolyn Brooks is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet and former Poet Laureate of the United States. Brooks’s poem, like “Things We Carry,” has a collective speaker identified with the first-person plural.