綠蕪臺下 The Old Temple By The Cold Stream
只見：只见：
逐句解 Line by line
And this is what they saw:
A bare two-character tag standing alone as its own unit, so it opens the showcase by itself.
Before the crag an old temple pillowed upon a cold stream; / where the eye alights, a desolate mist locks in a ruined mound.
The source prints 落目 where 落日, the setting sun, would be the expected reading. The character is kept exactly as the edition sets it, and the English follows the printed text, taking the phrase as the place where the gaze comes to rest.
Among the white cranes' thickets the years lie deep; / beneath the green-rank terrace, spring and autumn keep their own account.
春秋 is the seasons and, by long habit, the passing of years; the English holds both. 自 here is "of themselves" — the seasons turning with nobody there to watch them.
Bamboo sways its green pendants — one half hears speech in it; / a bird works at some remnant of a tune — as though it were telling a grief.
Two things almost speak and neither quite does. 青珮 is the jade pendant of court dress lent to a bamboo leaf. Both halves put a verb of perception in the same slot — 疑 and 似, each fifth of seven — so the couplet twice stops short of claiming that anything is really talking.
No cock nor dog comes through here, and the tracks of men are few; / idle flowers and wild creepers wind about the top of the wall.
跡 is read jì, the standard value, against the automatic jī; the character was registered as a fixed value earlier in this chapter for exactly this reason. 雞犬不通 turns inside out the proverbial picture of settled countryside, where you can hear cocks and dogs from one village to the next.
The poem is a formal eight-line piece in the plainest mode of ruined-place verse: a temple against a crag, mist on a mound, cranes, a mossy terrace, bamboo, a bird, and a wall with weeds on it. Every element is standard, and the rhyme runs on level tones throughout — stream, mound, autumn, grief, wall-top.
What the poem is careful about is emptiness. No cock nor dog comes through, and the tracks of men are few: the closing couplet says outright that nobody lives here. The description does double duty. It is a warning, and it is also the evidence that the emptiness will shortly be read as safety.
The two middle couplets are quietly full of things that seem to speak without speaking. Bamboo sways and one half hears words; a bird works at a remnant of a tune and seems to be telling a grief. Both verbs hold back — one seems, as though — and the holding back is the joke. In this chapter the vegetation really does talk, and the poem has said so while appearing to reach for the nearest stock phrase.