Truly it was:

The tag stands alone as its own unit and opens the showcase by itself, exactly as it did at the rhapsody on the ridge.

A far-spread place of mist and cloud; / a clear-washed dwelling of the immortal country.

The poem that follows drops out of the seven-character measure the chapter has used so far: it runs twelve lines of six characters, set two to a line in the source. The rhyme falls on the even lines and is level throughout — 家 花 蛙 霞 誇 紗.

Just the place for purifying the body and refining it; / fit indeed for planting bamboo and setting out flowers.

種 is zhòng, the verb of planting, matching 栽 in the same half-line; the automatic reading gives zhǒng, the noun. 修煉 is the Daoist term for refining the self — the long discipline of turning a body into something that lasts — and the couplet carries on the vocabulary the Eighteenth Duke had already used in his invitation.

Often one sees cranes come to the emerald crag; / at times one hears frogs calling from the blue pool.

每 and 時 open the two halves as matched words of frequency, which the English answers with often and at times.

It outdoes even the cinnabar stove of Tiantai; / and still looks for the bright mists of Mount Hua.

華 is huà here, the value it takes in the mountain's name. Kāngxī, under the grass radical at eight strokes, leads with 戸花切, sounding like 划, for the ordinary senses, then adds the Yùnhuì's 胡化切, sounding like 話, citing the Shū's 禹貢 at 至于太華 and the Ěryǎ's 釋山 at 華山, 爲西嶽. The character had been held at huá as a fixed value, and this line is what forced the split.

What talk of ploughing the clouds and angling for the moon? / The seclusion of this place is worth the boasting.

甚 is the questioning shén, not the intensifier shèn, and the automatic reading gives the intensifier here. 耕雲釣月 — ploughing clouds, angling for the moon — is the stock emblem of the hermit's life, farming nothing and catching nothing.

Sit long here and the hidden heart grows wide as the sea; / dim and blurred, the moon climbs the gauze of the window.

The poem closes on the same moon the Eighteenth Duke named in his invitation, now arrived at the window. 朦朧 describes the light and not the man sitting in it.