真是好山 Truly a Fine Mountain
按落雲頭，停立巔峰之上觀看，真是好山：按落云头，停立巅峰之上观看，真是好山：
逐句解 Line by line
He brought his cloud down, halted upon the topmost peak, and looked about him. Truly it was a fine mountain:
The tag 真是好山 — truly a fine mountain — is the storyteller's way of announcing that description is about to take over from narration. It is a descriptive flourish rather than one of the novel's fixed formulas, and it sits at the end of a line of ordinary prose rather than standing alone.
How high? — its summit grazes the blue empyrean;
高不高 is the A-not-A shape Chinese uses for yes-or-no questions, put here to rhetorical work: the question is asked only so that the answer can overshoot it. 碧漢 is the Cloudy Han, the Milky Way seen as a river running across the sky.
How vast? — its roots are driven down to the Yellow Springs.
黃泉, the Yellow Springs, is the world of the dead beneath the earth. Set against the Milky Way of the line before, it stretches the mountain across the entire vertical span of the cosmos before a single actual feature has been described.
Before the mountain the sun is warm; behind the ridge the wind is cold.
The couplet is stated bare here and then taken up again, half by half, in the two lines that follow. Say it, then say it again with the consequences attached — it is the signature move of this kind of set-piece description.
Before the mountain the sun is warm, yet through the three months of winter the grass and trees know nothing of it;
三冬 is the three months of winter. 無知 here is not ignorance but numbness: the plants on the warm face of the mountain never register that the season has arrived.
Behind the ridge the wind is cold, and through the ninety days of summer one sees the ice and frost unmelted.
九夏 is the ninety days of summer, counted as nine stretches of ten. And 不 shifts to bú before the falling tone of 化, which is held at huà by standing house ruling.
The dragon's pool meets the ravine, and the water runs long; the tiger's den leans on the cliff, and the flowers open early.
長 is cháng, the adjective — the water runs long — not zhǎng, to grow.
The water runs in a thousand courses like flying jade; the flowers open with a single heart like spread brocade.
飛瓊, flying jade, is white water scattering. 一心 is the single centre of a flower, and 一 shifts to yì before the level tone of 心. 似 is held at sì throughout this project.
Winding the ridge above, and winding the trees upon it; jagged beyond the rocks, and jagged the pines among them.
扢扠 is a colloquial pair of syllables meaning jagged, set in parallel against 灣環, winding. Each is used twice across the couplet, attaching first to the place and then to what grows on it — the ridge winds and so do its trees; the rocks jut and so do the pines.
Truly here are: high mountains, steep ridges;
The metre snaps from seven characters to three, and 真個是 — truly, here they are — marks the change from inside the poem rather than introducing it from outside. Ten three-character phrases follow, each an adjective tied by 的 to a noun, like a list read out at speed.
sheer cliffs, deep ravines;
Terrain paired with terrain, before the catalogue moves on to what grows on it.
fragrant flowers, fine fruits;
The pairing shifts from shape to the senses — smell and taste, where the preceding couplets gave only outline.
red vines, purple bamboo;
Colour takes over for the last four phrases, and the sequence runs red, purple, green, kingfisher — warm to cool.
green pines, kingfisher willows.
翠 is the blue-green of a kingfisher's feathers. The next set-piece in this block will use the same colour word of a woman's sleeve.
Through the eight divisions and the four seasons its face does not alter; through a thousand years and ten thousand ages its colour is as a dragon's.
八節 are the eight hinges of the year — the two solstices, the two equinoxes and the four days that open the seasons. 不 takes bù before the dipping tone of 改.
The set-piece is built in three movements and changes metre at every one. It opens with two lines of three-and-four that ask a question and answer it by going to extremes — how high, how vast — reaching up to the Milky Way and down to the land of the dead, so that the mountain is sized against both ends of the universe before we learn a single thing about it. Then it settles into balanced seven-character couplets. Then it breaks into a rattling catalogue of three-character phrases, each one bare adjective plus bare noun, before returning to seven characters for the last couplet.
The middle movement works by saying a thing and then saying it again with more in it, which is the engine of this whole genre. The line telling us the sun is warm in front of the mountain and the wind cold behind the ridge is picked straight back up, each half now carrying its result: the winter the near slope never feels, the summer that never reaches the far one. The same doubling governs the couplet on water and flowers, where the pool and the tiger's den of the first line become the thousand courses and the single blossom-heart of the second.
The closing couplet does what these poems almost always do: it converts description into permanence. Eight hinges of the year, four seasons, a thousand years and ten thousand ages — the mountain is put outside change altogether. This is not decoration. The Great Sage has come here to find a person, and the poem answers with a landscape that has no interest in persons whatsoever. The dragon in the last line is a colour, not a creature.