Parsing Wang Wei’s Passing Scented Temple (3)

王維

過香積寺

不知香積寺

數裡入雲峰

古木無人徑

深山何處鐘

泉聲咽危石

日色冷青松

薄暮空潭曲

安禪制毒龍

In parsing Wang Wei’s Passing Scented Temple (1) and (2) I tried to show how interpreting the pre-caesura part of a line of lüshi verse (‘regulated’ verse 律詩) as a ‘hypothematic’ can get us out of a parsing jam, witness my reading of the first two lines of the last quatrain above.

As for the creek sounds… it’s the steep-dangerous rocks that are choking [the creek].

As for the sunlight colors… it’s the deep-green-gray pines that are chilling [the sunlight].

This is not our only option for dealing with a pre-caesura. We may also consider interpreting the pre-caesura as a ‘topological‘, another idea advanced by Professor Peter A. Boodberg in the 1950s. The prefix ‘topo-’ means ‘locality’, ‘place’. Where the hypothematic framed a theme followed by focus on a particular aspect of that theme, the topological locates the following action or process in a specific space or time.

Look again at the last two lines of Wang Wei’s Passing Scent Packed Temple:

薄暮空潭曲

安禪制毒龍

I have taken the pre-caesuras (indicated by commas below) as topologicals:

At thinning dusk, the water’s bend is emptied.

In sitting zen, a venomous dragon is severed.

Or:

In fading sunset, the sky, the water, bends.

In calming meditation, (he) tames the poisonous dragon.

As a rule, there is also a third option. Sometimes, the pre-caesura may be a ‘modificative‘, the most tightly coupled, syntactically speaking, of the three options. The caesura or break in the flow is nearly imperceptible. The words are used to directly modify, to color, those that immediately follow.

A thin, dusk-bathed sky, lake and bend.

A calm, meditative control, poison and dragon.

But this interpretation is forced. It’s hard to avoid the influence of the third character of the last line, the strongly verbal 制 ‘control’ on its parallel counterpart 空 ‘empty’ in preceding line.

Perhaps a better take:

Thinning dusk empties Water’s Bend.

Stable trance controls Poison Dragon.

Meaning,

(The sky’s) thinning dusk …

(The hermit’s) stable meditation…

And this “…brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to …” the Hypothematic, albeit a more tightly-coupled one, a grammatical subject no less. There are other poems where treating the pre-caesura as a Modificative makes better sense. In sum, it’s well to keep the three options (hypothematic, topological, modificative) in mind when attempting to parse the opening two or four-character (pre-caesural) part of a line of five or seven character Chinese verse.