又有詩為證 A Poem To Prove It
言不盡，又有詩為證。詩曰：言不尽，又有诗为证。诗曰：
逐句解 Line by line
There is no end to the telling of it; and there is a poem in proof.
為 is wéi, to serve as — a poem serving as evidence. 不 lifts to bú here, and the reason is mechanical: 盡 is fixed to the falling tone jìn, exhausted, and 不 always shifts before a falling tone. This is the only place in the whole chapter where that happens.
The poem runs:
詩曰 announces a regulated poem, a stricter form than the sprawling piece just finished — and the rhyme keeps to one sound without a single miss.
Kickball on the field in the third month of spring; an immortal wind blows down these plain-robed beauties.
場 is chǎng, a real place, the playing ground. 嬋娟 is a set word for a lovely woman, and also for the moon — the same two characters Su Shi used in the line about wishing people long life a thousand miles apart. Calling them wind-blown immortals is the poem's most generous lie.
Sweat wets the powdered face, a flower holding dew; dust stains the moth eyebrows, a willow trailing mist.
Both halves take a real thing and hand it a poetic double — sweat becomes dew on a flower, dust becomes mist in a willow. It is the standard move of the form, and here it is quietly doing damage control: the poem has just spent twenty lines getting these women filthy and now cleans them up.
Kingfisher sleeves hang low, sheltering the jade shoots; pale-yellow skirts drag aside, showing the golden lotus.
拽 is yè for the fourth time of seven, and the last of the three that describe a skirt — the remaining three all stretch a stride. The couplet is a near-repeat of one in the long piece, with 低垂 for 低籠 and 斜拽 for 搖拽: the same picture, restated in the tighter form.
Kicked out at last and tender with exhaustion, cloud-tresses loosened, the jewelled coil gone askew.
罷 is bà, to have done — the kicking finished. 寶髻偏, the jewelled hair-coil knocked crooked, is the poem's last image and its most physical: after all the immortal wind and dew on flowers, what is left is a woman whose hair has come down.
A second poem on the same scene, and this one is built to a stricter pattern — eight lines of seven characters, the rhyme landing on one sound in all five of its positions without a miss. Set against the long piece before it, where three closes stood outside the pattern altogether, the contrast is the point. The sprawling form does the footwork; the strict form does the portrait.
This chapter now holds four set-pieces and no two are equally strict: four closes of six chiming in the first, four of four in the second, thirteen of eighteen in the long one, five of five here. Anyone reading these poems as interchangeable ornament is missing that the author was choosing a gear each time.
The last line is the one to keep. Everything before it has been comparison — dew, mist, immortal wind, the moon. Then the hair falls out of its pin, and for one line the poem describes something that actually happened.