原文 Original text
繁體 Traditional
Reader's edition
含詞賦 With rhapsody
打柴樵子 No Woodcutter No Herb Gatherer
打柴樵子全無影，採藥仙童不見蹤。打柴樵子全无影，采药仙童不见踪。
眼前虎豹能興霧，遍地狐狸亂弄風。眼前虎豹能兴雾，遍地狐狸乱弄风。
逐句解 Line by line
打柴樵子全無影，採藥仙童不見蹤。
打柴樵子全无影，采药仙童不见踪。
Of the woodcutter who gathers firewood there is not a shadow; of the immortal lad who picks herbs there is not a trace.
子 takes the everyday unstressed zi in the word for a woodcutter. Both figures are the standard human population of a Chinese mountain poem, and the line exists to say they are absent.
眼前虎豹能興霧，遍地狐狸亂弄風。
眼前虎豹能兴雾，遍地狐狸乱弄风。
The tigers and leopards before your eyes can raise a mist; over all the ground the foxes work their wind at will.
狐狸, the fox, keeps its full second syllable throughout this project. Raising mist and working wind are the marks of animals that have begun to cultivate power — these are not ordinary beasts.
The absence of the woodcutter and the herb-gathering boy is the point of the whole poem. Those two figures turn up on every mountain in Chinese verse, and their absence here says that no human being comes to this place.
And then the animals are shown doing magic. Raising mist and stirring wind is what a beast does once it has begun to cultivate, which is exactly what the creature they are hunting did for three hundred years.
The mountain, in other words, is full of things like her. The poem has spent ten lines saying so without once naming her.