拆鳳三年 Three Years The Phoenix Pair Parted
少頃間，那娘娘忽失聲道：「主公啊，我和你：少顷间，那娘娘忽失声道：「主公啊，我和你：
逐句解 Line by line
After a little while the Queen cried out suddenly: "My lord — you and I:
She thinks she is alone. The sentence carries its own speech tag at the end, so the lament starts up from inside it. 少 is shǎo, a little; 和 is hé, plain and.
"In a former life I burned an incense stick snapped at the head; in this life I have met with a rascally fiend king.
斷頭香 is a stick of incense that snaps partway through burning. Folk belief read that as an omen your marriage would be cut short — in the next life, not this one, which is why she reaches back to a previous existence to account for her present one. 了 is the neutral le.
"The phoenix pair broken apart three years — what day shall we meet? The mandarin ducks divided between two places, and sorrow the end of it.
Two birds, one to a line, and both are stock images for a married couple: phoenixes pulled apart, mandarin ducks divided. 處 is chù, a place. The source writes each of these four lines as a single run of fourteen characters, so each holds a whole couplet; the slicer cuts this one at its middle question mark and the segment puts it back together.
"The elder they sent had barely got word through when our fair match was startled apart and a life was lost.
The elder she means is Wukong, sent by her own king. 差 is chāi, to send someone off on an errand, not the commoner reading the automatic default reaches for. 散 is sàn here, the verb — 62 characters back the same character described her hair and took the other tone.
"All because the golden bells were past making out, and my longing runs wilder now than it did before."
The bells again — she has no idea what they are, only what they cost her. 解 is jiě, to undo or to make out. 相 is xiāng in 相思, the kind of longing that runs between two people rather than sitting in one.
Eight lines of seven characters, and the rhyme lands five times out of five, all on the same -ang sound: 香 xiāng at the head, then 王 wáng, 傷 shāng, 亡 wáng and 狂 kuáng. Taking the rhyme in the opening line is optional in this form and she takes it. The three lines outside the scheme close on 會, 信 and 識, which chime with nothing.
There is a small joke buried in the rhyme. Two of the five are the same sound written differently — 王, the fiend king, and 亡, dying. Repeating a rhyme character would be a fault; repeating the sound is not, so the ear gets the fiend and the death landing on the same note without the page ever admitting it.
拆鳳三年, three years since the phoenixes were pulled apart, is the chapter's own figure and it holds up. Those four characters come back once more, 4,603 characters later, in the mouth of the Bodhisattva explaining the sentence she handed down; 三年 turns up five times in the chapter and no statement contradicts another. The queen is quoting her own punishment and has no idea she is doing it.
The lament also plants a mistake the next passage exists to correct. 一命亡, a life was lost, is her belief that the monk sent to rescue her is dead. The denial arrives 55 characters later, in Wukong's first whispered sentence. She has spent the entire poem mourning someone sitting in her hair.