Bamboo Grove

Lines 1–2: solitude has a sound

幽篁 combines seclusion or depth with bamboo. It is more specific than an empty forest. The title's 館 suggests a lodge or retreat, but the poem itself puts the sitter among the bamboo without describing a building.

琴 is the qin, a plucked zither. It is not a violin or a lute. 長嘯 is a prolonged voiced call or whistle; “letting out a long call” avoids turning it into a song with invented lyrics. 復 adds a further action after the playing. This solitude is full of the speaker's own sounds.

Lines 3–4: an arrival without a visitor

人不知 says that other people do not know; it can suggest that they do not know the speaker is there or do not know this secluded life. Our translation keeps “knows me here” to leave some of that breadth.

相 does not always require the English “each other.” In 來相照 it directs the moon's shining toward the speaker. The sitter does not shine light back at the moon. The last line nevertheless gives the moon the action of a visitor: it “comes.” Read that small verb before deciding how literally the moon is a companion.

Read the locations together

The opening places the sitter in 幽篁裏, within secluded bamboo. 深林 then describes the wood from the viewpoint of the people who cannot know what happens inside it. The moon crosses that same enclosure in one verb, 來. This is how the poem gives a sense of being reached while keeping the speaker in place.

Bamboo Grove is a five-character jueju with an oblique rhyme at 嘯 and 照. Its four lines do not justify treating it as a demonstration of every rule for regulated quatrains. The sound pattern belongs to the poem's historical reading, while our pinyin is modern Mandarin.

The poem moves from “alone,” to “no one,” to the moon's arrival. That sequence lets the last line answer the apparent absence without a declaration that the speaker is lonely. We omit a historical tone grid.

This poem belongs to Wang Wei's Wang River collection, which also includes Deer Enclosure. The place-titles anchor short scenes, but each scene asks attention to work differently. In Deer Enclosure voices are heard without visible people. Here the source of the music is present, and it is the other people who remain away.

Follow the moon shelf for other lunar encounters, or compare Li Bai's Sitting Alone on Jingting Mountain for a different companion in nature. Neither text needs an added speech from its nonhuman presence.

The original English translation leaves the qin's name in place; the note supplies the instrument rather than replacing it with a more familiar but different one.