臨下界 Moon Goddess Come Down
但見：但见：
逐句解 Line by line
Behold:
Two characters, and the sixth set-piece of the chapter opens. The reader has been here before: the last time these women were described in verse they were playing football.
Sweeter of scent than jade; truer of speech than any flower.
勝 is shèng, to surpass or win — the ordinary victory sense, and the base has it right. 更 is gèng, more so. Both halves work by beating a comparison, the same device the disciples used for the light on the farmstead.
Willow brows sweeping like distant peaks; sandalwood lips parting on cherry.
柳眉 and 櫻唇 are both stock — willow-leaf brows, cherry lips — and both survive in Chinese today. 檀口 names the mouth for the reddish-brown of sandalwood, which is a rouge colour.
Kingfisher feathers standing up at the hairpin head; golden lotuses flashing under crimson skirts.
金蓮 again — the bound foot, the same euphemism the kickball poem used. The couplet moves from the top of the head to the feet in ten characters, which is how these portraits are built.
Like the moon goddess herself come down to the world below; like immortal maids fallen into the dust of earth.
嫦娥 is Chang'e, who stole the drug of immortality and fled to the moon; she is the standard comparison for a beautiful woman. 子 takes the light zi in 仙子. Both halves say the same thing — heaven coming down — and the second word for it, 凡塵, the dust of the mortal world, is what a spirit is diminished by touching.
The women get a second portrait, and this one is in the strict form: four lines, rhyming on all four even positions without a miss.
Every image is conventional and every one is the highest praise available. Willow brows, cherry lips, the moon goddess. What is worth noticing is that the last couplet compares them to immortals who have fallen — Chang'e exiled to the moon, spirit-maidens dropped into the dust. The poem reaches for beauty and lands on something about descent.
That is not an accident of vocabulary. Six passages ago the local god explained that seven heavenly maidens once bathed at the spring these seven have taken. The poem describes the spiders as fallen immortals while standing on ground that belonged to real ones.