Master and disciples travelled west. It was the season when spring ends and summer begins:

One line of prose to change the season and hand over to the poem. The colon is doing the same job a camera move does — 正是春盡夏初時節 means stop looking at the people and look at the weather. Seasonal poems like the one that follows are a fixed part of the novel's furniture, and they are usually placed exactly here: at the seam between one adventure and the next, where the pilgrims are walking and nothing is happening. They are the book's way of showing time passing without having to say how much — and sure enough, half a month goes by a dozen characters after this poem ends.

The weather is mild and clear, the air fresh; / in pond and marsh the water chestnut and the lotus come up.

清和 is the season's own name as much as a description of it — the fourth month of the old calendar was called the clear-and-mild, and a reader would hear the date in the word before hearing the weather. 芰荷 pairs two water plants that grow together and flower at the same time. The line is doing what all eight lines of this poem do: naming two things that belong to one moment of the year and letting the reader supply the rest.

Plums ripen in the last of the rain; / wheat comes on in the wind.

Two crops, two ways of arriving. The plums finish in the wet and the wheat fills out in the dry wind that follows, which is precisely the turn from late spring to early summer in the Yangtze provinces. ⚠ 梅逐雨餘熟 carries a pun the reader is meant to catch: the plum rains — the long wet spell of the fifth month — are named after this fruit because they fall while it ripens. So the line's word for rain and its word for fruit are two halves of the same weather term, split across the line.

Where the grass is sweet the blossom is coming down; / the oriole is old and the willow branch is light.

The first hint of loss in the poem. Blossom falling, a bird past its singing season, a willow that has shed enough to sway. 鶯老 is a standing phrase for late spring — the orioles stop being noisy — and it is the closest this cheerful poem comes to an elegy. The pairing is careful: sweetness and falling in the first half, age and lightness in the second. Nothing here is sad, but everything is on its way somewhere.

River swallows bring their young out to practise; / the mountain pheasant feeds her chicks and calls.

Both halves are about parents and offspring, which is not decoration. The chapter this poem is introducing turns on a household — a father, a mother, two sons, and a vow made about feeding people. ⚠ 子 is zǐ here, the full word for young, not the light ending it takes when it is stuck on the back of a noun. The pheasant is feeding her chicks; the sound has to carry the meaning, because nothing else in the line does.

South of the Dipper the days run long; / all things stand out in the light.

⚠ 斗 is dǒu — the Plough, the seven stars, not the word for a fight that it looks like. 斗南 means everything south of that constellation, which from where the poem is standing means the whole world; there is an old phrase calling the finest man alive the one man south of the Dipper. So the poem ends by pulling the camera all the way back. Seven lines of plums and swallows and willow twigs, and then the sky, and then everything under it lit up at once. That is a summer solstice line: the days at their longest and nothing in shadow.