Origin: This poem comes from the eighteenth chapter of A Dream of Red Mansions. Lin Daiyu accidentally cut the sachet, and Jia Yuanchun went back to save the Lantern Festival. On the Lantern Festival, Princess Yuan returned to the province and ordered Baoyu and other sisters to write poems on landscapes. Baoyu was thrifty, and Daiyu wrote a poem, which was rated as the best by Yuan Fei. This is the poem "Apricot Curtain in Sight".
Apricot curtains are in sight
Qing Dynasty: Cao Xueqin
Apricot curtains attract guests to drink, and you can see a villa.
Lingbi Goose Water, Sang Yu Yanziliang.
A bed of spring leeks is green, and ten miles of rice flowers are fragrant.
In prosperous times, you don't have to plow and weave.
The yellow wine flag attracts guests to have a good drink, but you can see the villa from a distance. Innocent geese play in the water spinach room, and flying swallows shuttle between mulberry trees and elms. A leek grows green in the spring breeze, and a rice field is filled with the fragrance of pollen. There is no hunger and cold in the era of enlightenment, so why bother to plow and weave all day!
Extended data:
Among many poems describing the Red Chamber, this poem is remarkable. The background of this poem is Yuan Fei's topic, which is somewhat similar to the poem that should be written. This kind of poetry requires elegant words and compliments, and there are few excellent works in ancient times. The first antithetical couplet "Apricot curtain attracts guests to drink, and there is a villa in the eye" integrates the topic of "Apricot curtain in sight", which is straightforward but ingenious.
Zhuan Xu's Water for Goose, Water for Goose, Swallow Beam in Sang Yu is the highlight of this poem. Couplets are purely nouns, but if translated into vernacular, they will be wordy: geese paddle on the water full of goose water, and swallows bring branches and leaves from Sang Yu to build nests on beams. This poem can be summed up in ten words. This is the unique grammar of poetry, which ancient Chinese can't do.
Of course, this is not Cao Weng's initiative. "Chicken crows at Maodian Moon, People walk on the bridge frost" and "I will think of you in the clouds, so I will think of me in the sunset" are all such sentence patterns. The necklace "a bed of spring leek green, ten miles of rice fragrance" is now widely spread and has a sense of picture.
The couplet "Don't be busy farming and weaving in prosperous times" means that there is no need to be busy farming and weaving because no one is hungry in peaceful and prosperous times. This couplet eulogizes the era of peace and prosperity and is written for Yuan Chun, which makes her very happy.