白蘋香 White Duckweed and Red Knotweed
逐句解 Line by line
White duckweed is sweet; red knotweed grows thick.
The lyric drops back to three-character strokes and picks the colours up again, white against red. 蘋 is pín, a water plant that spreads flat across ponds — not the modern word for an apple, which is written with the same character and read differently, and which is where an unwary reader lands. 蓼 is knotweed, a marsh plant that turns deep red in autumn. Both grow at the water's edge, so the pair also quietly answers the retreating watermarks of the opening line.
Tangerines green, oranges yellow; the willows failing, the grain in ear.
Two fruits and two plants, and the whole line is about ripening at different rates: the tangerine still green while the orange has turned. 秀 is the technical word for a cereal putting out its ear, so the line ends on the exact moment before harvest. Set against it, 柳衰 — the willows going over — makes the point that in autumn some things come in as others go out.
At the deserted village geese drop among the broken reed flowers; at the country inn a cock crows, and the beans are gathered in.
The lyric closes on two seven-character lines that finally put people in the picture, though barely: a village with nobody in it and a wayside inn with a cockerel. 碎蘆花 is the reed plumes shattering as the geese come down through them, which is a very precise piece of looking. 菽豆 is pulses and beans, the last crop off the field, so the song ends on the year's final harvest — and on the sound of an ordinary farmyard, which is the first noise anyone has made.
The second half of the song narrows from weather to plants and finishes on food. That descent is deliberate: it walks the reader down from sky to water to field to the beans in the barn.
The water plants deserve a moment. Both are common, both are the sort of thing a traveller sees from a road rather than a garden, and putting the white one beside the red one is the same trick the lyric has been playing since the red leaves and yellow flowers of its second line.
Ending on a cock crowing at a country inn is a small joke at the pilgrims' expense. They are four supernatural beings walking through an entirely ordinary landscape, and the landscape has not noticed them at all.