落湯雞 Like A Chicken In The Soup
老者道：「那道士：老者道：「那道士：
逐句解 Line by line
The old man said, "That Daoist —
Six characters, and unlike the bare tag before the first rhapsody this one carries its quotation mark, a subject and a colon, so it opens the recitation from inside its own unit rather than standing in front of it.
"A golden crown on his head, ritual vestments on his body.
The Daoist is introduced the same way the monk was, by his kit. Every rhyme word in this piece is level in tone: yī, wéi, chī, mí, chí, ní, qí, xī, jī.
"The command-tablet struck and sounding, talisman-water set to work.
為 is wéi, to act or perform. The character sits in a rhyme position and the rhyme is level throughout, so metre and meaning agree for once. 符水 is water that has had a paper talisman burned into it — standard Daoist ritual equipment, roughly the holy water of the tradition.
"He drove the gods and dispatched the generals, and haled the demon in.
將 is jiàng, a general: the spirit-troops a Daoist master summons and commands. This one is not in a rhyme position, so the sense has to decide it on its own.
"A wild wind rolling, black fog thick and blinding.
Both halves end on a doubled word, which is the standard way this kind of writing handles weather.
"At once it closed with the Daoist, and the two of them grappled.
相 is xiāng, "mutually" — the two of them locked together.
"They fought until the sky darkened, and the monster went back to the rainbow clouds.
The demon leaves the way it left the first rhapsody, going back up into cloud — the same shape of ending with a different word for the sky.
"Heaven and earth came clear and bright, and the whole crowd of us gathered.
乾 is qián in 乾坤, the two trigrams that stand for heaven and earth — the opposite reading to the gān, "dry," that the same character takes elsewhere in this chapter. The measure widens here from four characters to five.
"We went out to look for the Daoist: drowned in the mountain stream.
渰 is yǎn, to be submerged. The line delivers the outcome in its second half with no preparation at all.
"We fished him up for everyone to see — and he was for all the world like a chicken dropped in the soup!"
得 is the light de — "managed to" — they succeeded in fishing him out. 落湯雞, "a chicken dropped in the soup," is still the ordinary Chinese phrase for anyone soaked to the skin and looking ridiculous, and it is the second time in two rhapsodies that a dead specialist ends up compared to food.
The second rhapsody follows the same plan as the first and executes it more neatly. Equipment, then the summoning, then the weather, then the fight, then the body — and the measure widens on a regular schedule where the first one simply broke down in mid-line.
Six couplets of four and four, two of five and five, and a closing pair of seven and seven. Against that, the monk's rhapsody ran five four-beat couplets, fractured in the middle of the sixth unit, and left one five-character line standing with no partner at all. The Daoist gets the better poem and the worse death.
Both pieces end on the same joke, and it is the same kind of joke: a specialist reduced to a household object. A burst melon and a chicken in the soup. Two men have died on this errand now, and the village remembers both of them as something out of the kitchen.