梅雨絲絲 Plum Rains in Threads
正值那薰風初動，梅雨絲絲，好光景：正值那薰风初动，梅雨丝丝，好光景：
逐句解 Line by line
It was just the season when the warm south wind first stirs and the plum rains come down in threads. A fine sight:
The colon is the novel's cue that a set-piece is coming. 薰風 is the warm wind out of the south that marks early summer, and 梅雨 is the long rainy spell that arrives as the plums ripen — the same season East Asia still calls the plum rains today.
Softly the green shade thickens; the breeze is light, and swallows lead their young.
Eight lines of five characters each, rhyming on every second line. The swallows teaching fledglings to fly date the scene precisely: early summer, first brood out of the nest.
New lotus turns on the pond face; the tall bamboo spreads out by degrees.
扶蘇 describes foliage spreading loose and full. It is an old word — it is already in the Book of Songs — and it is here for its sound as much as its sense.
Sweet grass runs blue-green to the sky; mountain flowers carpet the ground.
Here is a case where the rhyme settles a reading that the dictionary alone leaves open. 鋪 is pū, the verb, to spread something out flat — flowers carpeting the ground. The other reading is a shop or a plank bed, and it sits in a different tone class that would not rhyme with 雛, 蘇 and 圖 at the ends of the other lines. The verse decides it before the meaning has to.
By the stream the rushes stand like planted swords; pomegranate fire lends splendour to the traveller's plan.
Two images that both turn plants into equipment. Sweet flag leaves really are sword-shaped, and 蒲插劍 lets the pond arm itself. 榴火 is pomegranate blossom, scarlet enough that Chinese has long used it as a name for the colour — and it closes on 行圖, the traveller's design, which quietly puts the pilgrims back in the frame.
Set-piece verse like this is not decoration and it is not plot. It is the novel changing gear — a signal to the listener that we have arrived somewhere and should look around before anything happens. The eight lines here do a job a modern storyteller would give to an establishing shot.
Notice how little of it is about the pilgrims. Grass, lotus, bamboo, rushes, pomegranate: the season is doing all the work, and the only human trace is the last two characters. That restraint is what makes the old woman's entrance in the next passage land — she walks straight out of a landscape that had no people in it.