雨潤紅姿 Rain Wetted Red And Tender
遂朗吟道：遂朗吟道：
逐句解 Line by line
And she chanted aloud:
Four characters standing alone and opening the showcase. 朗吟 is to chant at full voice, which is worth holding against the 悄語, the low soft speech, she will use two passages on.
Above the canopy my name was left with the King Han Wu; / and in the days of Zhou, Confucius raised his altar and made it known.
壇 is the Apricot Altar, the platform among apricot trees where Confucius is said to have taught. The first thing she does is name her own species through an allusion, exactly as each of the four elders did. 子 takes zǐ in 孔子.
Master Dong so loved me that a whole grove grew thick; / and Sun Chu once cherished my fragrance at the Cold Food feast.
Master Dong is the physician who took no fee but made each patient he cured plant an apricot tree, until he had a forest of them — which is why an apricot grove is still a name for the practice of medicine. Two allusions, both apricot.
Rain moistens my red form, tender and soft; / mist steams my kingfisher colour, now shown and now hidden.
This is the line the four elders will quote back at her twice in the next passage. 還 is hái, and 藏 is cáng, to hide.
I know myself that over-ripe I turn a little sour; / and where I fall, year after year, I keep the threshing-floor company.
場 takes cháng in rhyme position, as at every occurrence in this chapter, and this is the sixth and last of them. The closing couplet keeps her rhyme words identical to those of the five poems in the previous block — 王 揚 香 藏 場 — so six poems in this chapter now answer on the same five words.
Her poem is built exactly like the elders'. It names her species through allusion rather than description — Confucius teaching on the Apricot Altar, the physician Dong Feng whose fees were apricot trees — and it does the botany as autobiography: red form wet with rain, colour steaming in and out of mist.
It also keeps the same five rhyme words as every poem in the previous block. Whether she was told them or heard them from outside, she has come into the room able to answer in the strictest form there is, and she does it without being asked twice.
The closing couplet is the best writing in it and the strangest. Over-ripe, she says, I turn a little sour; and where I fall, year after year, I lie beside the threshing-floor. Apricots do ripen at the wheat harvest. It is a self-description nobody asked for, it undercuts everything the poem has just claimed, and it is the one moment in the chapter where a spirit's modesty rests on a plain fact about the plant rather than on a formula.