Ru Meng Ling: After Last Night’s Rain

The weather and the waking

疏 describes the rain as sparse or intermittent; 驟 gives the wind its sudden force. The contrast matters. It is not necessary to turn both into a downpour. The speaker remembers the weather through sleep, and 殘酒 is what remains of the wine’s effect the next morning. The translation refers to the lingering effects of drinking, not wine left in a cup.

The first two lines do not name the flowers. That delayed subject makes the question in line 3 feel like a change of attention: away from the speaker’s condition and toward something outdoors.

The person at the blind

卷 is juǎn here, “roll up,” not juàn, a volume of a book. 卷簾人 is simply the person rolling up the blind. The text supplies an action rather than a name, gender, or full household history. A servant or attendant is the usual contextual reading; our English does not specify more than the phrase does.

海棠 names a flowering crabapple. Its two characters form a plant name; neither the “sea” in 海 nor the individual graph 棠 should be translated independently inside the English line. “Just as it was” translates 依舊, an assurance the speaker immediately challenges.

Green and red

知否 is repeated. The lyric gives no stage direction to settle whether the reply is spoken aloud, murmured, or thought. Our punctuation treats the repeated phrase as two questions. The tone can carry insistence without becoming an angry scene.

綠 and 紅 are colors standing for leaves and flowers. 肥 and 瘦, “fat/full” and “thin,” make the change bodily and visible. Our translation uses “fuller” and “worn thin” to bring out the comparison with yesterday. The speaker infers that leaves have gained prominence while blossoms have been battered or lost. The lyric does not require an actual inspection to end.

The line can suggest the passing of spring and the speaker’s sensitivity to loss. It does not establish that the flowers stand for one particular absent person. Start with the disagreement about what has changed.

This ci follows the tune pattern Ru Meng Ling, “Like a Dream.” The tune name is not a narrative claim that the events were dreamed.

Its seven phrases have 6, 6, 5, 6, 2, 2, and 6 characters: 33 in all. Notice the acceleration at the two short repetitions and the return to a full six-character closing phrase. The rhyming endings include 驟, 酒, 舊, 否, and 瘦. Their modern Mandarin spellings do not all match, which is one reason not to infer historical rhymes from pinyin alone.

The pinyin uses modern Mandarin. No historical tone grid is printed here; the repeated question and uneven phrase lengths already make the tune’s shape available to a first reader.

Li Qingzhao makes a domestic exchange carry an unusually exact observation. A casual answer and an attentive answer see the same garden differently. The Song lyric form gives her room for both voices in fewer words than many regulated poems.

Read Spring Dawn beside it. Meng Haoran ends by wondering how many blossoms fell. This speaker answers the question through a proportion: more leaf, less flower. Yi Jian Mei uses falling flowers differently, to frame a separation it names explicitly. The distinction matters when browsing the nature poems. The wine here is a remnant of last night, not an invitation to drink now.

The Chinese is checked against the Siku quanshu transcription of 《漱玉詞》. That is a later collected text, not an autograph manuscript. The English translation, gloss, and notes were written for PoemWell.