From Birdsong Creek
(Tang) Wang Wei
People are idle, osmanthus flowers fall, and the night is quiet and empty.
When the moon comes out, the birds are startled, and the sound enters the spring stream.
Translation:
The valley was silent, and only osmanthus was falling silently. Silence makes the mountains in spring night more empty. The moon came out and the birds were disturbed by the moonlight. From time to time, there were waves of clear birdsong in the mountain stream.
Appreciate:
There are different opinions about the osmanthus in this poem. One explanation is that there are different kinds of sweet-scented osmanthus, including spring flowers, autumn flowers and four-season flowers. Here is a kind of spring flowers. Another view is that literary and artistic creation does not have to copy life. It is said that Wang Wei's "Yuan An Lying in the Snow" has green plantains in the snow, and things that cannot appear at the same time in real life are allowed in literary and artistic creation. But this poem is one of the five miscellaneous topics of Huangfuyue Yunxi where Wang Wei's friends live. Each of the five poems describes a landscape, which is close to landscape sketch, but different from ordinary freehand brushwork. Therefore, it is appropriate to interpret it as the real spring laurel in the mountains at this time.
Cinnamon has lush leaves and tiny petals. Flowers, especially at night, are not easy to detect. So the word "people are free" at the beginning can't be read easily. "People are idle" means that there is no human disturbance around, indicating the poet's inner leisure. On this premise, the delicate osmanthus fell from the branches before being noticed. Poets can find this kind of "falling" through the touch of flowers falling on their skirts, or through the sound, or through the slightest fragrance when petals fall. In short, the factors that "depravity" can affect people are very subtle. When this subtle factor can be clearly felt from the surrounding world, the poet can't help but marvel at the silence of the night and the special emptiness shown by this silence. Here, the poet's mood and the environmental atmosphere of Chunshan blend and influence each other.
In this spring mountain, everything is intoxicated with the color and tranquility of the night. Therefore, when the moon rises, bringing bright Yin Hui to this empty valley shrouded in darkness, all the birds in the mountain are startled. Birds are surprised, of course, because they are used to the silence of the valley. It seems that even the moon rises with new excitement. But it is also conceivable that the bright moonlight makes the scene before and after the valley suddenly change. The so-called "moon stars are scarce, birds fly south" (Cao Cao's "Short Songs") readers can associate it. However, Wang Wei lived in the prosperous Tang Dynasty, which was different from the chaos in Jian 'an period, and even birds and animals were nervous. The background of Wang Wei's A Bird Starts the Moon Mountain is the stable, unified and prosperous society in the Tang Dynasty. Although the bird is surprised, it is by no means "three turns around the tree, no branches to follow." They don't fly away from the spring stream, or even take off at all, but occasionally make noises in the Woods. They are not so much "surprised" as feeling fresh about the moon coming out. Therefore, if we compare Cao Cao's "A Short Song", in Wang Wei's poems, we can not only see the beautiful environment of spring mountain dotted with bright moon, fallen flowers and birds, but also feel the peaceful and stable social atmosphere in the prosperous Tang Dynasty.
Wang Wei likes to create a peaceful artistic conception in his landscape poems, and so does this poem. But the poem is about flowers falling, the moon rising and birds singing. These moving scenery not only make the poem look full of vitality, but also show the tranquility of the spring through movement. On the contrary, dynamic scene can achieve static effect, because the two sides of contradiction are always interdependent. Under certain conditions, movement can occur or be noticed, which is based on silence. "Tonamiyama is more secluded" contains artistic dialectics.