161. 登金陵凤凰台（李白）

传说李白登黄鹤楼想题诗，见到崔颢的题咏搁笔说「眼前有景道不得，崔颢题诗在上头」，后来到金陵凤凰台写了这首格局相似的七律。故事出自晚期汇编，未必可靠，但两首诗的对应太整齐：都是登高，都从传说起，都在第三联落到眼前山水，都以「使人愁」收尾。较劲的痕迹在细处：崔颢的愁是乡关，李白的愁改成长安——你写私人乡愁，我写士人忧国。诗史上看，两首并峙，说谁压倒谁都难；这首的可贵在于把乐府气的开阖装进了律体的框架，凤去台空四个字起头，气就比寻常应景登临高一格。

Legend has it that Li Bai, climbing the Yellow Crane Tower intending to write, saw Cui Hao's inscription and set down his brush: before my eyes a scene, but no words — Cui Hao's poem sits above. Later, at the Phoenix Terrace in Jinling, he wrote this seven-character regulated poem of matching frame. The story comes from late compilations and may not be true, but the correspondence is too neat: both climbs, both openings on legend, both third couplets landing on the landscape at hand, both endings in the heart aches. The contest shows in the detail: Cui Hao's grief is for home; Li Bai's is moved to Chang'an — you wrote private homesickness, I write the minister's worry for the court. In the history of the form the two stand side by side, and neither easily topples the other. This poem's worth lies in fitting a yuefu-like sweep inside the regulated frame: from the four characters the phoenix gone, the terrace empty, the breathing is already a notch above ordinary occasion-climbing.

凤去台空江自流如果删掉自字，只是一句平常的写景；有了它，江水成了全诗唯一不动的变量——凤凰会走，台会空，吴晋会亡，只有江水按自己的意思流。后面花草埋径、衣冠成丘都是这个自字的注脚：人间一切有为，在自流面前都是暂时的。第三联忽然转出三山半落、二水中分的工整，看似写景转折，其实还是自流的延伸——江水把洲分开了，把山映在天边，自然不与兴亡合作。结句的浮云蔽日才露出诗的真意：江水自然，人事不自然，不能望见长安，是自然被遮住了。

Take away the two characters of itself from the phoenix gone, the terrace empty, the river flows on of itself, and you have an ordinary line of scenery. With them, the river becomes the poem's one unmoved variable: phoenixes leave, terraces empty, Wu and Jin fall, and the river flows at its own will. The buried paths and the ancient mounds that follow are all footnotes to of itself: every human effort is temporary before a current that asks nothing. The third couplet's sudden neatness — Three Peaks half beyond the sky, two waters split around an isle — looks like a scenic turn, but it extends the same logic: the water divides the isle, mirrors the peaks at the sky's edge; nature does not cooperate with dynastic rise and fall. Only in the closing clouds screening the sun does the poem's real subject surface: the river is natural, affairs are not, and Chang'an unseen is nature blockaded.

浮云蔽白日出自《古诗十九首》，汉人用它说游子被谗、臣子被疏，到李白手里已是几百年的成语。他不说我见弃于朝，只说长安不见——望不见的城，比任何控诉都克制。写这首诗的时候（一说天宝六载前后），李白刚被赐金放还离开长安不久，浮云所指不难猜想。但诗不坐实，金陵的地望让它保持在登高望远的层面：长安确实望不见，浮云确实能蔽日，字面全通，寄托全在。把政治牢骚写成气象，是李白的看家本领——他从来不肯多说一个字的委屈。

Floating clouds screen the white sun comes from the Nineteen Old Poems, where the Han used it of wanderers slandered and ministers cast off; by Li Bai's hand it had been a set phrase for centuries. He never says I was cast aside by the court; only Chang'an cannot be seen — an unseen city more restrained than any indictment. When this poem was written, tradition says around the sixth year of Tianbao, Li Bai had lately been dismissed from court with a purse of gold, and the referent of the clouds is not hard to guess. But the poem never fixes it; the Jinling setting holds it at the level of climbing and gazing afar: Chang'an truly cannot be seen, clouds truly can screen the sun — the surface all sense, the burden all underneath. Turning political grievance into weather is Li Bai's signature: he never grants a single extra word of self-pity.