妖仙隱逸處 Where Fiend Immortals Lie Hidden
逐句解 Line by line
Mountain roe and mountain deer go two by two and pair by pair, thick upon one another; mountain crows and mountain magpies fall into ranks and gather in flocks, close-packed in flight.
The third and last pair joined at a semicolon, eleven characters against eleven. 攢 is cuán, to gather into a mass — the same reading it took in the alchemy poem at 攢簇五行, and not the one a dictionary lists first. 山 opens all four noun phrases in the line.
Mountain grasses and mountain flowers, more than the eye can take in; mountain peaches and mountain fruits, bright and fresh in their season.
看不盡 takes bú on the negative rather than bù. The reason is a small collision: the tone-change rule runs on the dictionary tone of 盡, but this edition reads that character as jìn, and the two do not agree — so the reading is declared rather than calculated, as it is everywhere this phrase appears.
Steep as it leans, and not to be walked, it is for all that a place where fiend immortals live retired.
The rhapsody's last line and its only judgement. 妖仙 sets fiend and immortal side by side without choosing between them, and 隱逸 is the vocabulary of a scholar who has withdrawn from office — the word for a distinguished man living quietly in the hills. The mountain is being complimented in the language of retirement.
Eight noun phrases across two lines and every one starts with the same character. Roe, deer, crows, magpies, grasses, flowers, peaches, fruits — all of them mountain-something, so that the mountain gets named eight times in thirty-six characters and everything living on it is only ever its property.
The closing line concedes the danger and then reclassifies it. Too steep to walk stops being an objection and becomes a recommendation, and the creatures who live there are handed a word that belongs to hermits and retired officials. A demon's lair is being described as a retreat, admiringly, by the man who has come to raid it.