Listen to this article周慧珺 行书：王维《积雨辋川庄作》
【释文】积雨空林烟火迟，蒸藜炊黍饷东菑，漠漠水田飞白鹭，阴阴夏木啭黄鹂，山中习静观朝槿，松下清斋折露葵，野老与人争席罢，海鸥何事更相疑。
【款识】王摩诘诗，周慧珺书。
【注释】空林：疏林。烟火迟：因久雨林野润湿，故烟火缓升。藜：这里指蔬菜。黍：这里指饭食。饷：致送。东：指东边田地上的农人。菑：本指初耕的田地，这里泛指田亩。夏木：高大的树木，犹乔木。夏：大。啭：鸟的宛转啼声。黄鹂：黄莺。山中句：意谓深居山中，望着槿花的开落以修养宁静之性。槿：也叫木槿，落叶灌木，其花早开晚谢。故以此悟人生荣枯无常之理。清斋：这里是素食的意思。露葵：经霜的葵菜。葵为古代重要蔬菜，有“百菜之主”之称。此诗也是他晚年生活的自我写照。野老：指作者自己。
【简析】
辋川庄，在今陕西蓝田终南山中，是王维隐居之地。《旧唐书·王维传》记载：“维兄弟俱奉佛，居常蔬食，不茹荤血，晚年长斋，不衣文彩。”在这首七律中，诗人把自己幽雅清淡的禅寂生活与辋川恬静优美的田园风光结合起来描写，创造了一个物我相惬、情景交融的意境。
“积雨空林烟火迟，蒸藜炊黍饷东菑。”首联写田家生活，是诗人山上静观所见：正是连雨时节，天阴地湿，空气潮润，静谧的丛林上空，炊烟缓缓升起来，山下农家正烧火做饭呢。女人家蒸藜炊黍，把饭菜准备好，便提携着送往东菑──东面田头，男人们一清早就去那里劳作了。诗人视野所及，先写空林烟火，一个“迟”字，不仅把阴雨天的炊烟写得十分真切传神，而且透露了诗人闲散安逸的心境；再写农家早炊、饷田以至田头野餐，展现一系列人物的活动画面，秩序井然而富有生活气息，使人想见农妇田夫那怡然自乐的心情。
颔联写自然景色，同样是诗人静观所得：“漠漠水田飞白鹭，阴阴夏木啭黄鹂。”看吧，广漠空蒙、布满积水的平畴上，白鹭翩翩起飞，意态是那样闲静潇洒；听啊，远近高低，蔚然深秀的密林中，黄鹂互相唱和，歌喉是那样甜美快活。辋川之夏，百鸟飞鸣，诗人只选了形态和习性迥然不同的黄鹂、白鹭，联系着它们各自的背景加以描绘：雪白的白鹭，金黄的黄鹂，在视觉上自有色彩浓淡的差异；白鹭飞行，黄鹂鸣啭，一则取动态，一则取声音；漠漠，形容水田广布，视野苍茫；阴阴，描状夏木茂密，境界幽深。两种景象互相映衬，互相配合，把积雨天气的辋川山野写得画意盎然。所谓“诗中有画”，这便是很好的例证。
唐人李肇因见李嘉佑集中有“水田飞白鹭，夏木啭黄鹂”的诗句，便讥笑王维“好取人文章嘉句”（《国史补》卷上）；明人胡应麟力辟其说：“摩诘盛唐，嘉佑中唐，安得前人预偷来者？此正嘉佑用摩诘诗。”（《诗薮·内编》卷五）按，嘉佑与摩诘同时而稍晚，谁袭用谁的诗句，这很难说；然而，从艺术上看，两人诗句还是有高下的。宋人叶梦得说：“此两句好处，正在添‘漠漠’‘阴阴’四字，此乃摩诘为嘉佑点化，以自见其妙。如李光弼将郭子仪军，一号令之，精采数倍。”（《石林诗话》卷上）“漠漠”有广阔意，“阴阴”有幽深意，“漠漠水田”“阴阴夏木”比之“水田”和“夏木”，画面就显得开阔而深邃，富有境界感，渲染了积雨天气空蒙迷茫的色调和气氛。
如果说，首联所写农家无忧无虑的劳动生活已引起诗人的浓厚兴趣和欣羡之情，那么，面对这黄鹂、白鹭的自由自在的飞鸣，诗人自会更加陶醉不已。而且这两联中，人物活动也好，自然景色也好，并不是客观事物的简单摹拟，而是经过诗人心灵的感应和过滤，染上了鲜明的主观色彩，体现了诗人的个性。对于“晚年惟好静，万事不关心”的王维来说，置身于这世外桃源般的辋川山庄，真可谓得其所哉了，这不能不使他感到无穷的乐趣。下面两联就是抒写诗人隐居山林的禅寂生活之乐的。
“山中习静观朝槿，松下清斋折露葵。”诗人独处空山之中，幽栖松林之下，参木槿而悟人生短暂，采露葵以供清斋素食。这情调，在一般世人看来，未免过分孤寂寡淡了吧？然而早已厌倦尘世喧嚣的诗人，却从中领略到极大的兴味，比起那纷纷扰扰、尔虞我诈的名利场，何啻天壤云泥！
“野老与人争席罢，海鸥何事更相疑？”野老是诗人自谓。诗人快慰地宣称：我早已去机心，绝俗念，随缘任遇，于人无碍，与世无争了，还有谁会无端地猜忌我呢？庶几乎可以免除尘世烦恼，悠悠然耽于山林之乐了。《庄子·杂篇·寓言》载：杨朱去从老子学道，路上旅舍主人欢迎他，客人都给他让座；学成归来，旅客们却不再让座，而与他“争席”，说明杨朱已得自然之道，与人们没有隔膜了。《列子·黄帝篇》载：海上有人与鸥鸟相亲近，互不猜疑。一天，父亲要他把海鸥捉回家来，他又到海滨时，海鸥便飞得远远的，心术不正破坏了他和海鸥的亲密关系。这两个充满老庄色彩的典故，一正用，一反用，两相结合，抒写诗人澹泊自然的心境，而这种心境，正是上联所写“清斋”“习静”的结果。
这首七律，形象鲜明，兴味深远，表现了诗人隐居山林、脱离尘俗的闲情逸致，是王维田园诗的一首代表作。从前有人把它推为全唐七律的压卷，说成“空古准今”的极至，固然是出于封建士大夫的偏嗜；而有人认为“淡雅幽寂，莫过右丞《积雨》”，赞赏这首诗的深邃意境和超迈风格，艺术见解还是不错的。（参看赵殿成笺注《王右丞集》卷十）
【Simple Translation】
Rim Chuan Zhuang, in the present-day Lantan Mountains in Shaanxi Province, is the place where Wang Wei lived in seclusion. The Old Book of Tang – Wang Wei’s Biography records, “Wei’s brothers all practiced Buddhism, lived on vegetables and food, did not eat meat and blood, and in his later years, he fasted for a long time and did not wear literary colors.” In this seven-verse poem, the poet combines his elegant and light Zen life with the tranquil and beautiful idyllic scenery of Ruanchuan, creating a pleasant and intermingling mood.
”The first couplet is about the life of a family in the fields. The first couplet is about the life of a farming family, which is what the poet saw on the mountain: it was the time of continuous rain, the sky was cloudy and wet, the air was moist, and the smoke was slowly rising over the quiet jungle, and the farming family was cooking on the fire at the bottom of the mountain. The women steamed quinoa and cooked millet, prepared the food, and carried it to Dong Zi – the eastern fields where the men had gone to work early in the morning. The poet’s vision, firstly, writes about the smoke of the empty forest, and the word “late” not only makes the cooking smoke on a rainy day very realistic and evocative, but also reveals the poet’s leisurely and relaxed state of mind. The first line is about the natural scenery.
The poet’s quiet observation of the natural scenery is also evident in the jubilee couplet: “Egrets fly in the indifferent water fields, and orioles sing in the shady summer woods.” Look, the egrets take off from the vast, empty, water-filled flat fields with such a leisurely and elegant attitude; listen, the orioles sing with each other in the dense forests with such a sweet and joyful voice. The poet chose only orioles and egrets, which are very different in form and habit, and depicted them in their respective backgrounds: the snowy egrets and the golden orioles have their own visual differences in color intensity; the flight of the egrets and the singing of the orioles, one taking the dynamics and the other the sound; the indifference, describing the vast expanse of the paddy fields and the vast horizon; the shade, describing the dense summer woods and the deep realm. The two scenes complement each other, making the mountains and fields of Rim River in the rainy weather very picturesque. This is a good example of “painting in poetry”.
Li Zhao, a Tang scholar, ridiculed Wang Wei for “taking the best lines from people’s writings” when he saw the poem “White heron flying in the water field and oriole singing in the summer woods” in Li Jiayou’s collection (Guo Shi Shu Shu, vol. 1); Hu Yinglin, a Ming scholar, strongly disproved it: “Mojizi is in the midst of the Tang Dynasty. Jia You in the Tang, how can the former steal from the future? This is Jiayou with Mochizuki poetry.” (Poetry Yabu – Inner Series, Vol. 5) It is difficult to say who used whose verses Jia You and Mo Jie were at the same time and a little later; however, artistically, there is a difference between the two poets. The Song dynasty’s Ye Mengde said, “The two lines are good for the addition of the words ‘indifferent’ and ‘cloudy’, which Mo Jizhi has embellished for Jiayou to see the beauty of his own. As Li Guangbi will Guo Ziyi army, a number of times more brilliant.” (Shihlin Poetry”, vol. 1) “Desert” has a broad meaning, “Yin Yin” has a deep meaning, “Desert Water Field” and “Yin Yin Summer Wood “Compared with “water field” and “summer wood”, the picture is open and profound, rich in the sense of realm, rendering the empty and confused tone and atmosphere of the rainy weather.
If the carefree working life of the peasant family in the first couplet has already aroused the poet’s interest and envy, then the poet will be even more enchanted by the free flight of the orioles and egrets. In these two couplets, the activities of the characters and the natural scenery are not simple imitations of objective things, but are sensed and filtered by the poet’s mind, colored with distinctive subjective colors and reflecting the poet’s personality. For Wang Wei, who “in his old age was only quiet and did not care about anything”, being in this paradisiacal Rim River Villa was really a great pleasure, which could not help but make him feel endlessly happy. The following two lines are about the joy of the poet’s Zen life in seclusion in the mountains.
”In the mountains, he studied and watched the hibiscus, and under the pines, he folded the dewy anemones.” The poet is alone in the middle of an empty mountain, under the pine forest, and the hibiscus and realize the transience of life, and picking dewberry for the vegetarian diet. This mood, in the eyes of the general public, is too lonely and indifferent, right? However, the poet has long been tired of the hustle and bustle of the world, but from it to appreciate the great taste, compared to the hustle and bustle, the fame and deceit of the world, it is like a world of clouds!
”The wild old man and the others contend for a seat, why should the seagulls be more suspicious of each other?” The poet calls himself a “wild old man”. The poet is happy to declare: I have long been free from any wit and mundane thoughts, and I am at the mercy of the world, so who would suspect me for no reason? The common people can almost be free from earthly worries, leisurely delayed in the joy of the mountains and forests. In Zhuangzi – Miscellaneous Articles – Fables, it is written that Yang Zhu went to study the Way of Laozi, and on the way, the host of the hostel welcomed him, and all the guests gave him a seat. In the book of “The Yellow Emperor”, there is a man on the sea who was close to the gulls and did not suspect each other. One day, his father asked him to catch the seagulls and bring them home. When he went to the seashore again, the seagulls flew far away, and the wrong-mindedness destroyed the close relationship between him and the seagulls. The two allusions, one positive and one negative, are combined to express the poet’s state of mind, which is the result of the upper couplet “Qingzhai” and “Xijing”.
This poem is a masterpiece of Wang Wei’s idyllic poetry, with its distinctive image and far-reaching flavor, expressing the poet’s leisurely mood of living in the mountains and forests, free from the mundane. In the past, some people pushed this poem to be the most important of the seven rhymes in Tang Dynasty, saying that it is the ultimate of “empty ancient and quasi-modern”, which is certainly out of the bias of the feudal scholars; while some people think that “the poem is more elegant and quiet than the poem “The Rain” by Youcheng, and appreciate the profound mood and superb style of this poem. It is still a good interpretation. (See Zhao Danchen’s notes on Wang Youcheng’s collection, vol. 10)
