鞦韆索冷空留影 The Swing Rope Hangs Cold
師徒說話，不覺早已入更。正是：师徒说话，不觉早已入更。正是：
八戒道：「師父，夜深了，有事明早再議，且睡，且睡。」師徒們果然安歇一宵。八戒道：「师父，夜深了，有事明早再议，且睡，且睡。」师徒们果然安歇一宵。
逐句解 Line by line
As master and disciples talked, the watches of the night had already come on without their noticing. It was just as:
The cue into the chapter's first set-piece lyric. 入更 means the night watches have begun; a Chinese night was divided into five, beaten out on a drum, and 更 is gēng in that sense rather than the gèng that means still more.
Deep, deep, the palace water-clock; thick, thick, the scent of flowers. At the embroidered door the bead curtain hangs; in the quiet courtyard not a lamp is lit.
The lyric opens on a pair of doubled words that do most of its work: 沉沉 for the slow drip of the clock and 廕廕 for the shade-heavy weight of the flower scent. Chinese poetry uses this doubling the way English uses a held note. 宮漏 is the palace water-clock, the official measure of the night, and it is the first thing in the poem — as it would be for a man lying awake counting.
The rope of the swing hangs cold and keeps only a shadow; the Qiang flute's sound has died and all four quarters are still. Around the house there are flowers, and the moon is caged in them and bright; across the open sky there are no trees, and the starlight shows.
Two of the finest lines in the chapter. The swing is the standard image of a garden in spring with girls in it, and here it is empty and the rope is cold — the poem gives us the pleasure by removing it. The 羌笛, the flute of the Qiang people of the western frontier, has been the sound of exile in Chinese verse for a thousand years. Its appearance in an Indian palace garden is not geography; it is a signal, and it means somebody here is a long way from home.
The cuckoo has left off calling; the butterfly's dream runs long. The Silver River lies across the vault of heaven; the white clouds go home.
Every image here is about going home, and none of them says so. The cuckoo's cry is heard in Chinese as the words better to go back, so a cuckoo falling silent is a summons that has stopped being made. The butterfly is Zhuangzi's, who dreamt he was one and woke unsure which way round it went. The clouds go home and the man watching them does not. 長 is cháng here, long — the character's other and far commoner job in this chapter is the zhǎng of 長老, the elder. It sits in the rhyming position, and the whole piece rhymes on that sound: 香, 光, 方, 芒, 長, 鄉, 涼. 銀漢, the Silver River, is what Chinese calls the band of stars — and it is the river Eight Rules used to command.
This is truly the place where a parted man feels it most: the wind stirs the young willows and it is bleaker still.
The poem finally names what it has been doing. 離人 is the person separated from home — the standing term of Chinese verse for the traveller, the exile, the one on the wrong side of a distance. Willows carry the whole of that tradition, because the word for willow sounds like the word for stay and a snapped willow twig was what you gave somebody leaving. A wind moving through young willows outside the room where Tripitaka is lying awake is about as unsubtle as this novel gets, and it is still lovely.
Eight Rules said, "Master, it is late in the night. Anything else can be discussed in the morning. Go to sleep, go to sleep." And master and disciples did indeed rest for the night.
Eight Rules gets the last word after the most beautiful passage in the chapter, and what he has to contribute is that it is bedtime. The placing is deliberate. The novel does this constantly: a set-piece of real lyric power, and then somebody in the room who wants his dinner or his sleep. It is what keeps the book from ever becoming solemn.
The chapter stops for a night lyric, and the lyric is doing something the prose cannot. Nobody in the story says that Tripitaka is homesick and frightened. The poem says it entirely in objects: a clock, an unlit courtyard, an empty swing, a flute that has stopped, a river of stars, clouds going home.
It is worth reading for the shape as well as the sense. The lines run four and four, then five and five, then seven and seven twice over, then back to four and four, five and five, and out on a pair of sevens — a piece that tightens and opens and tightens again. This is the shape of a lyric written to a tune rather than a poem in fixed lines, and the edition marks it as a showcase.
The garden it describes is the garden they have just been given to stay in, and every pleasant thing in it is switched off: the swing has nobody on it, the lamps are out, the music has ended. A pleasure garden with the pleasure taken away is a fair description of the position Tripitaka is in, four days from a wedding he does not want.