海晏河清 Calm Seas and Clear Rivers
逐句解 Line by line
Travelling merchants are glad the trade routes are open; farmers take pleasure in their weeding and ploughing.
客旅 is the travelling trader, the figure whose absence made the market square so eerie at the start of the chapter. He is back, and the roads are working.
From now on the millet will grow long and easy, and naturally the sowing and reaping will come to a rich harvest.
得 is dé, attainment. 稼穡, sowing and reaping, is a phrase straight out of the classics — the two halves of the farming year, and a word with real dignity attached to it.
Wind harmonious and rain timely, the people at peace and content; seas calm and rivers clear, enjoying the great peace.
調 is tiáo here. 風調雨順 and 海晏河清 are both fixed four-character phrases and both are political rather than meteorological: they are what people said about a reign that was going well. The rhapsody ends by describing good weather in the vocabulary of good government.
The rhapsody closes on two phrases that everybody in the Ming would have recognised instantly, and neither is really about rain.
Wind harmonious and rain timely, seas calm and rivers clear — these are the formulas for a well-governed empire under a virtuous ruler. Chinese political thought held that the weather answered to the conduct of those in charge, and a drought was diagnostic.
Which is exactly what happened here, taken absolutely literally. The prefecture's weather did depend on its governor's behaviour. The rhapsody ends by using the standard metaphor in a chapter where it turned out not to be a metaphor at all.