Spring Dawn

Lines 1–2

不覺曉 is not quite “I did not wake.” 覺 is to perceive, to notice. Spring sleep goes through the moment when dawn could have been seen. What he gets instead is birds, 處處, place and place, everywhere. 啼 is the cry of the bird, not a word for sadness by itself. Birds call. That is the line.

Lines 3–4

夜來 is “in the night just past.” He remembers the sound, not a view of the storm. The last line is a question. 多少 is the compound “how many.” 知 is “know.” The flowers have fallen by some number he did not witness.

《文苑英華》 records a variant of line 3, 欲知昨夜風, “if you want to know last night’s wind.” We keep the Quan Tang shi line, which already has the sound of wind and rain, and lets the question arrive only at the end.

The poem’s restraint is the poem. Answering the question, or turning the fallen flowers into a moral, adds a fifth line he did not write.

Four lines of five characters. The rhyme words 曉, 鳥, and 少 are rising-tone words in the 篠 group. 少 here is shǎo, “few,” inside “how many,” not the departing-tone reading shào, “young.” Line 3 ends on 聲, a level tone, and does not rhyme. An oblique rhyme means this is a 古絕, not a regulated jueju.

The tone table marks that historical class. 覺, the reading “to perceive,” and 落 are entering tones, oblique in the grid, whatever pitch Mandarin gives them now. 不 before 覺 (a rising tone) stays bù.

Deer Enclosure is the other quatrain of landscape here. Spring View shows what an eight-line regulated poem does with a spring morning of a very different kind.

Meng Haoran (689–740) was older than Li Bai and Wang Wei and died before the An Lushan rebellion. He is the poet of this scale: a morning, a sound, a question. He spent much of his life around Xiangyang and did not have the court career of Wang Wei. The poem does not need a particular year.

It belongs with the nature poems and with the Tang. If you are learning the page itself, the reading guide shows how to move between a line, its gloss, and its translation.