Deer Enclosure

The title

柴 is zhài, not the chái of firewood. It is a fence, a palisade, an enclosure. 鹿柴 is a place on the Wangchuan estate, a deer fence. English titles also say Deer Park and Deer Fence. “Park” can be confused with the Buddhist Deer Park where the Buddha taught. This poem is a corner of a private mountain property.

The quatrain sits in a sequence, the Wangchuan poems, each one a spot on the land. Wang Wei’s friend Pei Di wrote matching quatrains. We annotate Wang Wei’s poem on its own. The sequence is the context, not a puzzle that has to be solved before the four lines work.

Lines 1–2

The mountain is empty of people, and then it is not quite empty, because a voice is heard. 響 is the sound as it carries, close to an echo. Someone is there, or has just been there, out of sight. The poem does not identify them.

Lines 3–4

景 is used for 影, and here it means reflected sunlight. We use fǎn yǐng for 返景, following the Ministry of Education dictionary entry that quotes this poem. This is a documented literary Mandarin reading, not a reconstruction of Tang pronunciation. 返景 is the late light that comes back into the wood as the sun drops, not moonlight. It enters, and it shines again on the moss. The human voice and the light are both things that arrive in a place where the eye finds no one.

There is no moral sentence. The emptiness is not explained as doctrine. Wang Wei was a serious Buddhist layman, and readers sometimes pull the poem toward that. The biography can wait for his page. The four lines are a mountain, a voice, and light on moss.

Five characters, four lines, shelved with the jueju. The rhyme words are 響 and 上, oblique-tone endings. The later Pingshui rhyme inventory lists both under the rising-tone 養 group; 上 also has a departing-tone entry. Its modern reading shàng does not by itself settle its historical tone. 人 and 林 end the other two lines and do not form the rhyme pair.

So the tonal grid looks tidy, and the rhyme class does not pass a regulated-verse check. Call it a 古絕, and still read it as a quatrain. The lüshi page explains eight-line regulated verse and its extended forms. Spring View offers one regulated poem for comparison.

不 before the fourth-tone 見 is bú in modern Mandarin. That sandhi is a reading aid. In the rhyme books 不 is entering tone, which is oblique, whether or not the modern pitch rises.

Wang Wei (traditionally 699–761) was a Tang court poet, a painter, and a musician, with a mountain estate at Wangchuan, south of Chang’an. The deer enclosure is one named spot in the poems he wrote about that land. The poem is not a war poem. His later captivity during the An Lushan rebellion is part of the life, and it is not the scene of these lines.

Read it next to Spring Dawn, Meng Haoran’s morning question, on the nature shelf. The Tang page says where both poets sit in the century. The light here is sun, not the moon. The moon pages are a different walk.