萬家燈火 Ten Thousand Homes Alight
正是那：正是那：
逐句解 Line by line
Truly it was:
正是那：, truly it was, is printed on its own line, so the announcement opens the description. The thirteenth chapter used these same three characters for the same job on the evening Tripitaka reached the temple where he made his sweeping vow — the vow he recalled a few passages ago.
On the four walls a cold wind rises; in ten thousand homes the lamps burn bright.
四壁 is the city wall on all four sides, not the walls of a room. The couplet sets cold outside against light inside, and every couplet after it keeps that shape.
Along the six avenues doors and windows are shut; in the three markets gate and courtyard are closed.
六街三市 comes back from the prose of the party's entry, where the same phrase described this city at its busiest. Here the identical layout is shown shutting down for the night.
The fishing skiff comes home among the deep trees; the plough leaves off its short rope.
罷 is a verb here, bà, to cease or have done — against the light ba at the end of a sentence, which is how the character reads at most of its other appearances in the chapter. 短繩 is the trace the ox is harnessed by.
The woodman's axe-haft is at rest; the scholar's voice is heard at his recitation.
學子 xué zǐ keeps the full zǐ, a scholar, and does not let the second syllable go light. 柯 is the helve of the axe, so the woodman is named by the tool he has put down.
Four couplets of five characters, and the poem does exactly one thing: it closes a city. Doors, windows, gates, courtyards, boats, ploughs and axes all stop, and the only sounds left in it are a wind and a boy reading aloud.
Set against the rhapsody at the city gate, this is the same place at the other end of the day. That poem had wine shops loud and a glad air rising from the flowered towers; this one has everything shut. Both are conventional, and the pairing is the point — the novel is showing a working city on both sides of a single evening.
It also does the practical work of putting everybody indoors. In a few sentences Tripitaka will climb a pagoda in the dark with one companion, and the poem has just established that there is nobody else awake to see it.