The four went on westward, and when they had travelled a good while winter waned once more, and it was just those days of spring's three months:

Winter ends in four characters and the poem starts before the sentence has finished. The cue 正是 is carried inside the line that names the season rather than standing on its own, so this unit opens the poem instead of merely announcing it. 三春 is the three months of spring taken together, not the third of them.

The splendour of things came into concord; the Dipper's handle swung back to yin.

The couplet dates the scene by the sky instead of the calendar. 斗 is dǒu, the Dipper, and 斗柄 is its handle — the three stars that swing round the pole across the year like the hand of a clock with one hand. When the handle points at 寅, it is the first month of spring.

Grass shoots greened the ground from end to end; willow eyes filled the dyke with blue.

柳眼, willow eyes, is the standard image for the first buds, which open narrow and lidded and do look like something waking up. The couplet is built on two colour characters in matching positions, 綠 against 青, and two body-words lent to plants, 芽 and 眼.

A whole ridge of peach blossom, red brocade stained through; half a stream of misted water, kingfisher gauze alight.

The blossom does not lie on the ridge, it soaks into it: 涴 is wò, to smear or stain. The two lines answer each other measure for measure — 一嶺 against 半溪, a whole ridge against half a stream — with brocade set opposite gauze.

How much wind and rain; how boundless the mood.

The poem drops from seven characters to four for two lines and turns inward. 幾多 and 無限 are quantifiers left deliberately open, so the couplet stops describing what the season looks like and starts on what it does to the person looking.

Sun on the flower hearts burned them bright; swallows carried moss buds, light in the beak.

Stillness in the first half, motion in the second. 啣 is a variant of 銜, to hold in the mouth, and 輕 does double duty: the moss bud is light, and so is the flight carrying it.

The mountain's colour, Wang Wei painting in wash and depth; the birdsong, Jizi's tongue running every way.

Two famous men in one couplet, doing quite different jobs. Wang Wei is the painter, so the mountain's colour comes in graded wash; 季子 is a style name of the persuader Su Qin, so the birdsong is rhetoric. The line confirms the identification itself, because 縱橫 is both the birdsong going every which way and the name of the school of political argument Su Qin belonged to. 子 reads zǐ, a full syllable, because it is part of a name and not the throwaway suffix it becomes elsewhere.

Fragrance spread its embroidery with no one to admire it; butterflies danced and bees sang, and they at least had feeling.

鋪 is the verb pū, to spread out, not the pù of a shopfront. The closing couplet turns the whole poem sour for a moment — all this on display and nobody looking — and then rescues it with 卻有情, granting to butterflies and bees the attention the human travellers are too busy to give.