月華明 The Moon's Brightness
正是那：正是那：
當夜各寢不題。当夜各寝不题。
逐句解 Line by line
It was just then:
The chapter's last cue, and the only one that introduces a night piece rather than a battle or a beauty.
The bronze water-clock drips and the moon's brightness is clear; / the golden bells chime and the wind carries the sound.
Two instruments for measuring the night: one that drips and one that rings. 銅壺滴漏 is the bronze clepsydra, a vessel that measures time by letting water out at a fixed rate. It was the standard timekeeper of a Chinese palace, and the sound of it is the sound of a long night in a great many poems. 金鐸 are the metal bells hung from the eaves of a hall, which ring when the wind moves. 華 here is huá, the brightness of the moon — the same character that stood for frost's brilliance in the hare's rhapsody two hundred characters ago.
The cuckoo is calling, and spring is half gone; / the fallen flowers have nowhere to go, and it draws on towards the third watch.
The cuckoo and the fallen flowers are two of the oldest signals in Chinese poetry and both mean the same thing: time is passing and something is being lost. 杜宇 is the cuckoo, named after a legendary king of Shu who was supposed to have turned into one; its call is conventionally heard as better go home, and it always sounds in poems where somebody cannot. 更 again reads gēng, the night watch. The verse counts from the second watch in the prose above to the third here, so the poem covers about two hours.
The imperial garden is desolate, and the swing casts its shadow; / the blue void floats empty, and the Silver River lies across it.
The garden is the one that was wrecked five thousand characters ago, and the swing is the one the wedding chapter hung there. 鞦韆, the swing, was a fixture of spring festivals and of the women's quarters, and it appears in the previous chapter's garden rhapsody. Its shadow in an empty garden is the chapter's last word on the marriage that did not happen. 銀漢 — the Silver River — is the Milky Way. It is where the Weaver Girl and the Herdboy are kept apart for all but one night a year, so putting it across the sky above an unmade wedding is not a neutral choice.
In the three markets and the six streets not a traveller walks; / a whole sky of stars, and the night's light is clear.
The city empties and the chapter puts itself to bed. 三市六街 is a set phrase for the whole of a city's public space, markets and thoroughfares together. 斗 in 一天星斗 is dǒu, the dipper and by extension the stars — the same character and reading as the somersault cloud earlier, which the machinery got wrong while getting this one right. The couplet empties the city, which is the last thing the chapter does before it puts everybody to bed.
That night they all went to their rest, of which no more need be said.
Six characters, and they drop out of verse and back into the storyteller's ordinary voice. 不題 — of which no more need be said — is the formula for closing one thread and picking up another. It comes from the days when this material was performed aloud, and after eight lines of moonlight it lands like somebody blowing out a lamp.
The chapter's violence ends and it ends in a night poem, which is not what a reader of the last five thousand characters would expect. There has been a garden wrecked, a battle at Heaven's gate, a goddess in the sky and a city on its knees. The last thing the chapter does is listen to a water clock.
Everything in the poem is looking backwards. The imperial garden is the one the fight destroyed; the swing is the one the wedding chapter hung; the fallen flowers are the same word the wrecked-garden rhapsody used for the petals carpeting the ground. Even the moon's brightness reuses the character that described the hare's white fur. The verse is a quiet inventory of what the day cost.
And the Silver River lying across the empty sky is the sharpest touch in it. That is the river which keeps two lovers apart for every night but one, hung over a palace where a marriage was called off this afternoon and a father is lying awake wondering where his daughter is.
Then six characters of ordinary prose put everyone to bed. The book has done this since chapter one — however high the verse climbs, the storyteller's voice comes back and closes the shutters.