又值早春 Early Spring on the Road
行夠多時，又值早春天氣。聽了些：行够多时，又值早春天气。听了些：
逐句解 Line by line
They had gone a good while when the weather turned to early spring. They heard something of this:
聽了些 — they heard something of this — is the cue that verse is coming, and it cues it by ear rather than by eye. What follows is a birdsong piece.
Purple swallows at their murmuring; golden orioles clear and sweet.
睍睆 is read xiàn huǎn. The second character is huǎn, on the authority of the 廣韻, which spells it 戶板切 in the rising-tone 潸 rhyme; the commoner modern reading huàn is wrong here. The pair is lifted whole out of the 詩經 — 睍睆黃鳥, in the 凱風 poem of the 邶風 section — where the 毛傳 declines to take it apart and glosses it simply 好貌, a fine appearance. A vernacular novel is quoting the oldest poetry anthology in China to describe an oriole.
Purple swallows murmur till their fragrant bills grow weary; golden orioles, clear and sweet, ply their artful notes.
The trick here is expansion. The two four-character phrases of the line before come back, each stretched to seven, so 呢喃 and 睍睆 are heard twice over — first as bare description, then with a consequence attached. The swallow murmurs until its bill tires; the oriole's sweetness turns into sheer frequency.
Fallen blossom carpets the ground like spread brocade; kindling green covers the hills like heaped matting.
落紅 is fallen blossom and 發翠 is new leaf: dying set against growing inside a single couplet. That doubleness usually belongs to poems about late spring, and putting it at spring's beginning is the poet's own choice. 似 is sì.
On the ridge, green plums setting like beans; before the cliff, ancient cypress holding the cloud.
結豆 is precise about the season — the green plums are still no bigger than beans. 留雲 then gives the cypress something the plums have not got: it does not merely stand in the mist, it keeps the mist there.
The wilds turn moist, the haze-light thin; the sand grows warm, the day's colour dusked.
The lines shorten to five characters here, the shortest in the piece, and the vocabulary shortens with them: four of the ten characters are plain descriptive verbs doing all the work. 曛 is the yellow light of late afternoon, the particular colour just before dusk.
In garden and grove, here and there, the flowers loose their stamens; the yang returns to the broad earth, and willow buds are new.
幾處 is chù, places. 陽回大地 then says outright, in the language of cosmology, what the six lines before it have been showing in pictures: the warm principle coming back after the winter solstice. The poem ends by naming its own subject.
The chapter's first set-piece is a seasonal one, and its placing is conventional: an ordeal has closed, the next has not begun, and the gap is filled with landscape. Passages like this are easy to skip and repay attention, because they are where the novel shows off what it can do with metre. This one moves through four line-lengths — four characters, then seven, then six, then five — before coming back to seven, and the variety is a display rather than a slip.
The opening move is worth watching closely. Two four-character phrases, 紫燕呢喃 and 黃鸝睍睆, are stated bare, then immediately restated as the first halves of seven-character lines that hand each bird a consequence: the swallow murmurs until its bill tires, the oriole's sweetness becomes frequency. The reader gets the same words twice with a stretch of new grammar in between, and the second hearing carries the weight of the first.
睍睆 is a learned borrowing, lifted from the 凱風 poem in the 邶風 section of the 詩經, where it describes the yellow bird whose singing consoles a mother of seven sons. The 毛 commentary refuses to analyse the word and glosses it simply as 好貌, a fine appearance. Its turning up in a popular novel of the 1590s is a small act of self-positioning: the poem is claiming a classical pedigree for what is otherwise ordinary seasonal scene-painting.
The last couplet does what such poems almost always do, which is to name in cosmic terms what the earlier lines have shown in pictures. 陽回大地 is the warm principle returning after the solstice, and the willow buds are the evidence for it. Placed here — just after the pilgrims have escaped a demon, and just before they drink from a river that makes men pregnant — the stress on generative force is not an accident.