While the year sinks westward, I hear a cicada
Bid me to be resolute here in my cell,
Yet it needed the song of those black wings
To break a white-haired prisoner's heart....
His flight is heavy through the fog,
His pure voice drowns in the windy world.
Who knows if he be singing still? - -
Who listens any more to me?
余禁所禁垣西，是法厅事也，有古槐数株焉。虽生意可知，同殷仲文之古树⑴；而听讼斯在，即周召伯之甘棠，每至夕照低阴，秋蝉疏引，发声幽息，有切尝闻，岂人心异于曩时，将虫响悲于前听？嗟乎，声以动容，德以象贤。故洁其身也，禀君子达人之高行；蜕其皮也，有仙都羽化之灵姿。候时而来，顺阴阳之数； 应节为变，审藏用之机。有目斯开，不以道昏而昧其视；有翼自薄，不以俗厚而易其真。吟乔树之微风，韵姿天纵； 饮高秋之坠露，清畏人知。仆失路艰虞，遭时徽纆。不哀伤而自怨，未摇落而先衰。闻蟪蛄之流声，悟平反之已奏；见螳螂之抱影，怯危机之未安。感而缀诗，贻诸知己。庶情沿物应，哀弱羽之飘零； 道寄人知，悯余声之寂寞。非谓文墨，取代幽忧云尔。
西陆蝉声唱，南冠客思深。
那堪玄鬓影，来对白头吟。
露重飞难进，风多响易沉。
无人信高洁，谁为表予心。
Luo Binwang's Zai Yu Yong Chan (在狱咏蝉)—a foundational text of Early Tang prison poetics, composed with a preface that itself constitutes a miniature treatise on carceral phenomenology—opens with a catastrophic acoustic and spatial lock: Xi lu chan sheng chang, nan guan ke si qin. (西陆蝉声唱，南冠客思侵。). The "western quadrant" (xi lu) names both the autumnal astronomical position (the mansion of the Pleiades) and the literal western wall of the prison compound, collapsing celestial time into judicial space. The cicada's "song" (chan sheng chang) is not a pastoral ornament but an acoustic assault that "invades" (qin) the prisoner's thought. The "southern cap" (nan guan) is the metonymic prisoner, referencing the Chu captive in the Zuo Zhuan who wore his native cap in Jin imprisonment. The verb qin (to invade, encroach) transforms the cicada's cry from ambient sound into a hostile penetration of the carceral subject's mental fortress. The poem thus establishes that in the prison ecosystem, even the natural world operates as an instrument of surveillance and psychological torment.
The second couplet delivers one of the most devastating visual confrontations in Tang political poetry: Na kan xuan bin ying, lai dui bai tou yin. (那堪玄鬓影，来对白头吟。). The "black-templed shadow" (xuan bin ying) refers to the cicada's dark, glossy head-appendages—an anatomical feature that the preface explicitly links to the insect's "gentlemanly" (junzi) appearance. The prisoner, by contrast, has already "white-headed" (bai tou) himself through the accelerated aging of incarceration. The phrase "how can I bear" (na kan) introduces a phenomenological collapse: the prisoner cannot sustain the optical confrontation with a creature whose very blackness broadcasts youth, vitality, and metamorphic purity, while his own whiteness testifies to bureaucratic decay and judicial ruin. The cicada does not merely sing; it performs a visual accusation, its dark silhouette functioning as a biological mirror that inverts the prisoner's chromatic trajectory from dark-haired official to white-haired captive.
The third couplet translates the prisoner's physical entrapment into a meteorological allegory of impossible locomotion and silenced utterance: Lu zhong fei nan jin, feng duo xiang yi chen. (露重飞难进，风多响易沉。). The "heavy dew" (lu zhong) is not merely morning moisture; in the preface's logic, it is the purified liquid that the cicada alone is permitted to drink, a sacramental fluid that now weighs down its wings and prevents flight. The "much wind" (feng duo) is the atmospheric density of the prison's acoustic environment, a turbulent medium that "sinks" (chen) the insect's sound before it can reach a sympathetic ear. Through this couplet, Luo Binwang constructs a political physics in which the very elements that should sustain the pure creature (dew, air) have been weaponized by the carceral environment. The poet does not merely describe the cicada's difficulty; he projects his own juridical paralysis onto the insect, transforming its biological struggle into a precise diagram of how a political system suppresses movement and drowns testimony.
The poem achieves its terminal resolution through a devastating interrogation of the witness function and the communicative impossibility of innocence: Wu ren xin gao jie, shui wei biao yu xin. (无人信高洁，谁为表予心。). The "high purity" (gao jie) is the preface's central entomological thesis: the cicada "lives in purity" (ju gao jie) because it feeds on dew, inhabits high branches, and sheds its skin as a spiritual metamorphosis. The prisoner claims this purity by structural homology, but the closing line reveals the juridical catastrophe: there is "no person" (wu ren) who will "believe" (xin) this homology, and consequently "no one" (shui wei) who will "express" or "testify to" (biao) the prisoner's heart (yu xin). The poem thus stands as the definitive monument to the Early Tang political prisoner's double bind: the cicada's purity is self-evident to nature but unverifiable in a courtroom, and the poet's integrity is structurally identical to the insect's—visible only to those who already know how to read the allegory, and useless before a tribunal that demands forensic rather than poetic evidence.
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