Vast vast the water falls
where the white egrets fly
Dark dark the summer trees
where the yellow orioles sing
from "Written at my house near the Wang River at a time of incessant rain" collected in Poems of Wang Wei translated by G.W. Robinson. And indeed the repetition reminds one of the persistent rain.
I love Robinson's note on these lines:
Though literary allusion, involving mild plagiarism, is an essential feature of Chinese literature, some critics feel that here Wang Wei, always particularly inclined to plagarise, has gone too far. He has taken two successive five-syllable lines from the T'ang poet, Li Chia-yu, and tacked on a pair of reduplicated expressions at the beginning (vast vast, dark dark). But it is also argued that he has greatly enhanced the feeling of two otherwise banal descriptive lines.
And so for day 692
04.11.2008