Bird Calls in the Ravine
鳥鳴澗
Niǎo míng jiàn
Wang Wei’s Bird Calls in the Ravine, with pinyin and English notes on spring gui blossoms, moonrise, and the intermittent calls that make stillness audible.
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About the text and pronunciation
The simplified view changes character forms, not the edition. Notes and sources retain the cited text.
The Chinese source is shown in traditional characters by default, with a simplified view available. Pinyin is modern standard Mandarin, a reading aid, not Tang or Song pronunciation.
Word by word, in the order of the line. A gloss is a crib. It is not the translation.
Word meanings — Line 1
- 人 rén person
- 閑 xián at ease
- 桂花 guì huā gui blossoms
- 落 luò fall
Word meanings — Line 2
- 夜 yè night
- 靜 jìng still
- 春山 chūn shān spring mountain
- 空 kōng empty
Word meanings — Line 3
- 月出 yuè chū moon rises
- 驚 jīng startle
- 山鳥 shān niǎo mountain birds
Word meanings — Line 4
- 時 shí from time to time
- 鳴 míng call
- 春澗 chūn jiàn spring ravine
- 中 zhōng within
English translation by PoemWell.
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Original
人閑桂花落，
夜靜春山空。
月出驚山鳥，
時鳴春澗中。
Translation
A person rests at ease; gui blossoms fall.
The night is still, the spring mountain spacious and empty.
The rising moon startles mountain birds;
now and then they call within the spring ravine.
Try it from memory
After reading, recall the underlined word or phrase in each line. Say its meaning before opening the answer. These prompts use the text edition printed above.
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Line 1 · What does the marked word mean?
人閑桂花落，
Pronunciation hint
guì huā
Reveal meaning and translation
桂花 — gui blossoms
A person rests at ease; gui blossoms fall.
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Line 3 · What does the marked word mean?
月出驚山鳥，
Pronunciation hint
yuè chū
Reveal meaning and translation
月出 — moon rises
The rising moon startles mountain birds;
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Line 4 · What does the marked word mean?
時鳴春澗中。
Pronunciation hint
chūn jiàn
Reveal meaning and translation
春澗 — spring ravine
now and then they call within the spring ravine.
One more question: what changes?
Compare the opening and closing lines. What changes in the scene, the speaker’s attention, or the feeling? Choose a Chinese word as evidence, then compare your reading with the notes. More than one answer may be reasonable.
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Line-by-line notes
Stillness begins with attention
人閑 gives a person at ease. It does not explicitly say “I,” so our translation retains an unspecified human presence. 桂 is kept as gui because assigning a modern autumn-flowering garden species would create a false contradiction with the poem’s repeated 春, spring. The text establishes the season more firmly than it establishes a modern botanical identification.
Blossoms fall even in the opening line. 靜 and 空 therefore cannot mean that absolutely nothing happens or lives here. They describe the quality of the scene in which slight events can register.
The moon starts a brief disturbance
月出 supplies the rising moon, and 驚 presents it as startling the birds. This is the poem’s connection between light and response; it is not a general scientific claim about every bird at moonrise.
時 means “from time to time” here. The calls are intermittent, not a continuous chorus. The ending returns those sounds to 春澗中, inside the spring ravine, so the disturbance remains within the still scene rather than replacing it with another world.
Try reading the poem without the word 時. The loss of intervals would change the relation between sound and quiet. Compare Autumn Evening in the Mountains, where noises likewise let the reader recognize life within an apparently empty place. Neither poem needs an invented biography of solitary enlightenment.
Notice the relation between 落 and 出. The small movement in the first line is downward, while the larger change of light in the third comes with the moon's rise. The calls then stay in the ravine, held there by the last word 中. That final location brings the view down from the sky to the listening space the title names.
Form and tone
Four five-character lines move from stillness to a slight event and its sound. 空 and 中 rhyme in the even lines. The title foregrounds birds, but their voices are withheld until the close.
See the quatrain guide for the form. Pinyin gives modern Mandarin pronunciation; no unverified historical tone grid is supplied.
Historical context
The poem appears among five pieces on Huangfu Yue’s Cloud Stream in the cited collection. Its place in a set of named scenes encourages a precise kind of looking and listening, without requiring the reader to invent a solitary hermit’s biography.
Continue with Wang Wei or the nature shelf.
Read this poem alongside the contrasting selections in our mountain poetry guide.
Sources
Chinese text compared with 鳥鳴澗, public transcription on Wikisource. Punctuation is editorial; the English translation and reading notes are original to PoemWell. See also the individual poem within the five Cloud Stream pieces.
English translation, gloss, and notes by PoemWell. The translation is original to this site.
The Chinese source is shown in traditional characters by default, with a simplified view available. Pinyin is modern standard Mandarin, a reading aid, not Tang or Song pronunciation.
Updated .
Cite this reading
Wang Wei. “Bird Calls in the Ravine” (鳥鳴澗). PoemWell. English translation by PoemWell. Updated .
https://poemwell.org/poems/bird-calls-in-the-ravine
Credit the poet for the Chinese original and PoemWell for this translation and commentary. Use the permanent page link above; source editions are listed separately.