砧杵叮咚 Washing Blocks in the Far Court
逐句解 Line by line
Block and mallet sound their clatter from another courtyard; passes and mountains stretch away out of sight and stir the heart towards home.
This is the most freighted line in the poem for anyone reading in Chinese. 砧杵 are the stone block and wooden mallet used to beat cloth soft, and the sound of them on an autumn night is one of the oldest signals in the poetry: women pounding fabric to make winter clothes for men away at the frontier. That is why 關山, the mountain passes, follows immediately, and why the line ends on 鄉心, the heart turning homeward. Four pilgrims a long way from Chang'an are listening to it.
The cold cricket cries clear, as if it knew what a man is thinking; shrill at the bedside, it breaks the dreaming soul.
寒蛩 is the cold-weather cricket, autumn's insect, and it has kept sleepless people company in Chinese verse for well over a thousand years. 嚦嚦 is a doubled sound-word for a thin piercing cry. The last three characters, 破夢魂, breaking the dream-soul, take the noise right into the sleeper.
Two lines and both of them are about being far from home, which is not what anybody in the scene has said out loud.
The sound of clothes being beaten on a block is doing all the work. A Chinese reader hears winter coming, women at their labour and men at the frontier, without a word of it being stated, and the pilgrims are as far from Chang'an as anyone in the tradition ever was.
It also quietly answers the chapter's opening. The autumn song at the start was a landscape with nobody in it. This one has a bed in it, and somebody lying awake.