猿啼巴月小 Gibbons Cry Under A Small Moon
逐句解 Line by line
In the jade tower she claws at the kingfishers; in the golden hall she shatters the mandarin ducks.
Both birds are emblems of married love — kingfisher feathers on a bride's headdress, mandarin ducks as the standard image of a devoted couple. The line makes her fighting into the wrecking of a marriage.
Gibbons cry, and the moon over Ba is small; wild geese call, and the sky over Chu is long.
長 is cháng, long — the rhyme word, chiming with light, king and startled, where the seniority reading would break the scheme. Ba and Chu are the ancient river gorges and southern lands, and gibbons crying there is one of the oldest images of desolation in Chinese poetry.
The eighteen arhats quietly call their applause; the thirty-two devas are every one of them alarmed.
喝 is hè, to call out — not the drinking word. The arhats and devas are the painted figures on the walls of the hall, and the verse has them watching the fight like a crowd at a match.
The verse pulls right out of the garden for two lines and puts us in the river gorges, with gibbons crying and geese going over. It is a standard move in Chinese battle poetry — widening to landscape at the moment of greatest violence.
The gibbon is a small private joke on the chapter. Its title calls Pilgrim the Mind-Ape, and here in the middle of his fight an actual ape cries somewhere off in the gorges.
And the last line is the best comedy in the poem. The painted saints on the walls are applauding under their breath while the lesser gods panic, which turns a monastery hall into a ringside.