一片戰爭場 A Battlefield In The Garden
陰風四起，殘月無光。你看他兩人。後園中一場好殺：阴风四起，残月无光。你看他两人。后园中一场好杀：
逐句解 Line by line
A dark wind rose on all four sides, and the waning moon lost its light.
The same waning moon that rose at the second watch, now dimmed. The novel keeps its own night consistent from passage to passage.
Look at the two of them.
Five characters, the storyteller pointing.
In the back garden, a fine killing:
中 is plain zhōng, and 場 is cháng, the measure word for an event that runs its course — one whole killing. A tag is never parted from the verse it introduces.
The dark wind rises out of the ground, the waning moon shakes its faint light.
The verse opens by picking up the two images the prose just used, which is how these set pieces knit themselves to the narrative around them.
Still and empty, the halls of the Brahma King; guttering low, the gallery of the little ghosts; and there in the back garden, one whole field of war.
場 is cháng again, and here it is the rhyme word — the whole verse rhymes on the same sound as light, gallery, king and startled, and the other reading would break it. Rhyme position settles this, not the sense.
The battle verse begins, and it opens by repeating the two images from the prose immediately before it — dark wind, waning moon — so the poem grows out of the scene instead of interrupting it.
Calling a monastery the halls of the Brahma King is elevated language for a small provincial house with a hundred monks in it, and that inflation is the point. A scuffle in a vegetable garden is being given the vocabulary of a war between heaven and hell.
The last word of the second verse line is fixed by rhyme rather than by meaning. On sense alone it would take the reading for a physical place, which is exactly what a field of war is — but the rhyme scheme of the whole poem forbids it.