Yeah, sure, praise him, whatever

Wang Wei's response to the emperor's challenge is subdued

Following the Royal Model: A Vision of Spring in the Spring Rain, On the Occasion of our Procession Along the Elevated Road from Penglai Palace to Celebration Palace
Wang Wei

There, across the Qin plains, the River Wei loops,
There, the Huanglu hills ascend around the palace rooves.
From the cloistered willow avenues the royal carriage treks,
On our cantilevered bridge we view the flowers of the parks.
The palace’s double Phoenix Towers stand among the clouds,
In the rain, spring trees and city homes by the thousand.
It is no palace pleasure trip to view this blossoming:
He rides the warm yang ether to perform the rites of spring.


王维  奉和圣制从蓬莱向兴庆阁道中留春雨中春望之作应制
渭水自萦秦塞曲，黄山旧绕汉宫斜。
銮舆迥出千门柳，阁道回看上苑花。
云里帝城双凤阙，雨中春树万人家。
为乘阳气行时令，不是宸游玩物华。

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The Emperor builds an elevated road from his palace to some outlying pleasure pavilion, and one day in spring, the court processes along this road. The emperor composes a verse - or maybe has one of his people do it for him - and asks his attendant courtiers to match it.

The last guy turned the emperor into the god of spring, flowers opening wherever he treads. Wang Wei simply positions the emperor as the ruler astride the world. Given that the emperor fed him the metaphor in the most literal way with the construction of a raised road, this is frankly unimaginative work by Wang Wei.

So what’s really going on in this poem? I think that Wang’s work is done in his parallelism, which is rather more imaginative than usual. This doesn’t come out very well in the translation, so I’ll just give you a couple of examples.

In the first couplet, the river loops - which is conventional enough. The obvious parallel would be to have the hills soar or loom, but instead, Wang’s hills ascends *around* the palace. That curious ‘around’ preserves the parallelism, but doesn’t give us the expected contrast.

In the third couplet, the numbers are parallel, but ‘double’ and ‘thousand’ don’t form the obvious crisp contrast we’d expect. You might pair hundreds with thousands; or you might contrast a single with thousands. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a double paralleled to a large number like this. It works, formally, but it leaves the line a little off-kilter, and gives the whole poem a lightness.

Which is lucky, because there’s not much else in this particular poem. I think I prefer the other one! Perhaps toadying eulogies produced to order weren’t Wang Wei’s strong suit…

Here is the reading by Cinix.