It fell just at the season when autumn ends and winter begins, and they saw such things as these:

見了些 jiàn le xiē, and they saw such things as, is what throws the switch from prose into verse. It is not one of the stock announcements the novel keeps for the job, but it does the same work and it ends the same way — on a colon, with the sentence left hanging until the poem finishes it.

Wild chrysanthemums let their last blooms fall; the new plum sets its tender buds.

The opening couplet — a matched pair of lines, which is the unit this whole poem is built from — works by cancelling one flower against another, chrysanthemums finishing as plum begins. That sets the pattern for everything after it. This is a poem built around a season turning, not around any one scene.

Village upon village takes in the standing grain; everywhere they are eating the fragrant broth.

村村 and 處處 are doubled frames — village-village, place-place — and each syllable keeps its full tone rather than going light. 禾稼 hé jià is the crop still standing in the field. The line is the harvest, which in this calendar belongs to the last days of autumn.

In the level woods the leaves come down and the far hills show; at the winding stream the frost lies thick and the deep ravine runs clear.

曲 is qū, winding, not the qǔ of a tune. The couplet turns on what stripping bare reveals: the far hills come into view because the trees have stopped hiding them, and the ravine runs clear because the year has taken everything out of it.

The Yingzhong pitch stirs; the burrowing creatures close their nests.

Here is the poem telling you the date without printing one. 應鍾 yìng zhōng is the last of the twelve 律, the graduated set of ritual pitch-pipes and bells the old calendar was tuned to. Each pipe answers to one month, and this one answers to the tenth — early winter — so naming the note names the month, the way saying Advent names December without a number. 閉蟄 is the shutting-in of the hibernating animals. Both phrases come out of the 孟冬 section of the 《月令》 almanac, which the next six lines keep raiding. And 應 takes the answering reading yìng: 康熙字典 gives it at 於證切, 音譍, glossed 答也, to answer. What a bell does is answer, in its turn, to a month.

Pure now are yin and yang; the month's god is Xuanming;

玄溟 stands in for 玄冥 xuán míng, the spirit of winter and of water, who is paired with the god Zhuanxu in the same almanac passage. The 世德堂本 prints the form with the water radical, and that is what is encoded here.

The Water Virtue stands at its height; the sun of Shun is kind with clear weather.

水德 shuǐ dé is the phase-virtue the five-phase scheme hands to winter, and 盛 shèng describes it — at its height — matching 純, pure, in the line before. 舜日, the sun of Shun, is a stock figure for a kindly reign, so the couplet lays a claim about the cosmos beside a compliment to the government.

The breath of earth sinks downward; the breath of heaven climbs.

Lifted almost whole out of the 《月令》: in the first month of winter the breath of the sky climbs and the breath of the earth sinks, the two stop meeting, and the year shuts down. 降 is jiàng, to come down, not the xiáng of surrendering.

The rainbow hides and casts no shadow; on pool and marsh the ice begins.

虹藏不見 is very nearly a straight quotation from the 《月令》, where the rainbow going into hiding is one of the tenth month's signs. 藏 reads cáng, to hide — and this is the one place in the whole chapter it does. The other thirty-one are the zàng of Tripitaka's name.

On the hanging cliff the trailing vines have dropped their flowers; pine and bamboo, gripped by the cold, are greener than before.

The poem finishes on the two plants that refuse the season, and all the weight falls on 更 gèng: everything else has given up, and these are not merely still green but greener than before. 掛索 is the vine hanging down the rock face like a dropped rope.