排得齊整 Set Out In Perfect Order
左右有四五百張單桌面，真個排得齊整：左右有四五百张单桌面，真个排得齐整：
逐句解 Line by line
To left and right were four or five hundred single tables, and truly they were set out in perfect order:
The prose sentence ends on its own invitation to look, and the poem starts inside it. 排得齊整 takes the light de before its result.
The ancients said: a hundred flavours of delicacy, a thousand goblets of good wine;
The poem opens by quoting somebody else, and the borrowed couplet brings its own rhyme with it.
jade-rich creams and curds, brocade-shredded meats rich and red.
錦縷 is meat shredded as fine as brocade thread. The quotation ends here.
Jewelled settings, brilliant with flower-colours; fruits whose savour is fragrant and deep.
The first line the poem composes for itself, and it holds the borrowed rhyme for one more position before changing to a new one that it then keeps to the end.
Sugar in dippers, dragon-twined, ranged in lion-and-immortal shapes; cake-ingots drawn from the oven, set out as paired phoenixes.
斗 is dǒu, the dipper — a dry measure. In simplified script this character has been merged with a completely different one meaning "to fight", which is why the everyday reading comes out dòu; in the traditional text they are two separate characters and only the measure belongs here.
Of flesh there was pork and mutton, chicken and goose, fish and duck, meat of every kind; of the lenten sort, vegetable dishes, bamboo shoots, wood-ear and mushroom.
The longest line in the poem and the only one that simply lists. The two halves answer each other exactly: six kinds of flesh against four of vegetable.
Several kinds of fragrant soup-cake; sugar-soaked pastries brought round again and again.
數 is shù here, a number of times — not the shuò of the racing pulse the same character took during the diagnosis.
Smooth and soft, the millet rice; fresh and clean, the wild-rice gruel.
菰米 is the grain of the wild rice plant — not rice at all, but the seed of a marsh grass, gathered wild and prized for centuries before it went out of fashion. The line answers the one before it in the same five-and-five shape.
Every sort of noodle broth, fragrant and hot with spice; every dish replaced as it went, delicious and sweet besides.
This is the poem's one lapse: neither half of this line lands on the sound the other eight rhyme positions keep. 還 is hái here, "besides", not the huán of returning a courtesy earlier in the chapter.
Prince and ministers raised their cups and only then took their places; by station and by rank the flagon went slowly round.
And the poem closes by putting the room back in order. 名分 takes fèn, the allotted station — the same reading the character had when the steward spoke of a share in the kingdom, not the fēn of dividing.
Four or five hundred single tables to left and right, and then the prose sentence ends on its own invitation to look — and the chapter's first long poem starts inside it. It opens by quoting somebody else: a hundred flavours of delicacy, a thousand goblets of wine, creams and curds and shredded meats.
The rhyming repays attention. The borrowed couplet runs on one sound; the poem's own first line keeps that sound for a single position more; and only then does it change to a second sound and hold it to the close. Eight of the nine rhyme positions land. The one that misses is the noodle-broth line, which drifts off in both halves.
What is actually being catalogued here is worth setting against the last few passages. Sugar moulded into lions and immortals, cake-ingots shaped as paired phoenixes, six kinds of flesh and four of vegetable, soup-cakes, sugared pastries, millet rice and wild-rice gruel. It is a very great deal of food, assembled in gratitude for three pills of soot and horse urine.
The last line puts the room back in order: prince and ministers raise their cups and only then sit down, and the flagon goes round by station and by rank. After a chapter of inversions — a king on the floor, a monk held as security, a monkey prescribing — the banquet reasserts precedence, and that is the last thing the poem says.