掃愁帚 The Broom That Sweeps Care
果然是：果然是：
逐句解 Line by line
Truly it was a case of:
Three characters standing alone, and the tag that opens the chapter's longest set-piece on wine. 果然 occurs three times in the chapter and this is the only one of the three that introduces verse.
The hook that angles for poems, the broom that sweeps care away — for dissolving all things there is nothing like wine.
釣詩鉤 and 掃愁帚 — the hook that angles for poems, the broom that sweeps care away — are Su Shi's two nicknames for wine, coined in his rhapsody on the spring colour of Dongting. The poem opens by naming its subject twice over before saying what it is.
A man lets his reserve go and opens his breast; a woman forgets herself and opens her mouth to laugh.
兒 in 男兒 is the full ér and 子 in 女子 the full zǐ — the only such pair in these passages, standing against half a dozen swallowed suffixes on either side. The couplet sets the two sexes in parallel, which the rest of the poem will not do.
Faces flush red as the young peach; bodies sway like the tender willow.
似 is held at sì throughout this project. 夭桃, the young peach, comes from the Book of Songs, where it is the figure for a bride.
Rambling and chattering, the talk runs on; pinching and nipping, there is feeling in it.
Both halves are built on doubled syllables — 絮絮叨叨 of speech, 捻捻掐掐 of touch — and 掐 is held at qiā.
Now she is seen smoothing her cloudy coiffure; now again waving a tapering hand.
時見 and 又見 place us as onlookers, and from here on the poem watches only her.
Again and again she cocks up a little foot; time after time she shakes out a sleeve.
兒 in 腳兒 is the swallowed suffix er. 數 is shù and 將 the object-fronting jiāng. Keep this detail in mind — the cocked foot comes back in prose two passages later, and the Great Sage will make use of it.
Her powdered neck sinks of itself; her slender waist begins to turn.
覺 is jué. 自然 and 漸 both make the movement involuntary: she is not deciding anything.
Words of joining are never let fall; her soft breast half discloses itself, the golden clasp loosened.
露 is lù, the literary reading for half-disclosure, as at 湘裙半露 earlier in the chapter. 不 takes bù before the rising tone of 曾.
Drunk at last, the jade mountain topples indeed; with bleared eyes she gropes about and makes a sorry show.
餳 is xíng, of eyes gone sticky and half-shut, not the táng of malt sugar. 玉山頹 comes from the Shishuo xinyu, where a drunk Ji Kang is said to topple like a jade mountain giving way — a figure of admiration there, put to distinctly less kind use here.
The poem is a set piece on wine and announces itself as one in the first line, borrowing Su Shi's two nicknames for it — the hook that angles for poems, the broom that sweeps care away. What follows demonstrates both claims at once: drink loosens speech and it dissolves restraint, and the poem tracks the second process through eight lines of increasingly particular observation.
The structure is a descent through the body and a loss of control. It begins with an abstraction — a man opens his breast, a woman opens her mouth to laugh — then narrows to face, hand, foot, sleeve, neck, waist, breast. The verbs shift with it: at first she acts, smoothing and waving and shaking out, and by the end things happen to her of their own accord — the neck sinks, the waist begins to turn, the clasp comes loose. The last line takes away even the dignity of the classical allusion it borrows.
It is worth noticing who is being watched. The couplet on men and women is the only balanced one; after it the poem forgets the man entirely and observes the woman alone. We are placed beside the Great Sage, sober, counting the signs — and what he is counting them for becomes plain in the passage that follows.