寒蟬應律 The Cold Cicada Answers
但見那：但见那：
逐句解 Line by line
And what met the eye was this:
但見那 is the teller's cue that a set-piece is coming — roughly, and here is what met the eye. In the spoken performance this novel grew out of, it is the moment the voice changes gear from prose into chant, and the audience settles.
A quick rain gathers up the last of the heat; a single paulownia leaf takes fright.
The second line is an idiom in the making. 梧桐一, one paulownia leaf, is the seed of 一葉知秋 — one leaf and you know it is autumn — still in daily use for reading a whole situation off one small sign. 驚 is startle, not fall: the leaf gives a jump, as though it had noticed the season a moment before anybody else.
Fireflies over the sedge path at dusk; crickets talking, and the moon's glow bright.
莎 is suō, the sedge or nutgrass, not the shā that turns up in place names and foreign words. 康熙 leads with 蘇禾切, sounded 唆, and files the 說文 gloss 薃侯也 — a plant — underneath it. The dictionary then quotes a rhapsody by Mǎ Róng that sets the sedge beside 蒲柳, willow and osier — which is the very pair this poem reaches for two lines further down, some fourteen centuries later. 蛩 is the cricket, and 語 gives it speech rather than noise.
Yellow mallows open, lit through with dew; red smartweed spreads over the sandy shoal.
Colour arrives on cue, yellow against red and both against the pale of dew and sand. 蓼 is liǎo, smartweed, which reddens along wet ground in autumn and is one of the standard signals for the season. 汀 is the low sandbank a river leaves behind — the flat, damp, unglamorous edge of things, which is exactly where the plant grows.
Willow and osier are the first to shed; the cold cicada answers the pitch-pipe and sings.
Two more idioms, both still alive. 蒲柳 gave Chinese 蒲柳之姿, the constitution of a willow, which is how you call yourself frail without making a fuss about it. 應律 is the older idea: the twelve pitch-pipes were held to sound with the twelve months, so a creature crying in time with the calendar is answering an instrument. 應 is yìng, to answer — 康熙 files it at 於證切 and quotes the 集韻 gloss 答也, against the level-tone yīng of ought to. The cicada is not simply making a noise. It is on the beat.
Eight lines of five, rhyming on the even lines throughout, and not one word of plot in any of them. The poem exists to make the reader feel a season change, and it works by piling up small creatures and small plants until the weight of them is autumn.
The construction is careful. Rain, leaf, firefly, cricket, mallow, smartweed, willow, cicada — seven of the eight lines pair something living with what the season is doing to it, and the exception is the opening rain, which is the season itself arriving. The last line is the only one where the creature is not merely reacting: the cicada answers, and keeps time.
Two of these images have outlived the poem. One leaf on the paulownia and the willow's frail constitution are both ordinary Chinese today, which means a modern reader meets this passage already half-quoting it without knowing where the words came from.