九曲九灣 Nine Bends Of Running Water
逐句解 Line by line
Ridge-tops rearing high, reaching up to touch the cloud and mist; earth-veins running far, running through to the sea and the sacred peaks.
The topic couplet comes back in full and each half grows a tail, which is how this form works. 海岳 pairs the sea with the marchmount peaks — the largest things available — so the site is being sized against the whole world.
The gate close by a stone bridge, nine bends and nine turns of running water looking back on it; the garden planted with peach and plum, a thousand stems and a thousand heads vying in lush bloom.
顧, to look back, gives the water a face. 斗 is dòu, to contend — the blossoms competing with one another. 華 here is huá, the splendour-and-flower sense; hold that, because the same character turns up two lines on doing something else entirely.
Vines and creeper hung over three trees and five; iris and orchid scattering their scent through ten thousand flowers and a thousand more.
三五 and 萬千 are not counts but gestures — a few, a great many. 芝蘭, the iris and the orchid, is the standard pairing for fragrance and, by long habit, for fine character. The garden is being praised in the vocabulary used for a virtuous person.
The description is doing something the earlier two did not: it is measuring. Cloud and mist above, sea and sacred peaks beyond, nine bends of water at the gate. This is not a farmstead being admired. It is a site being surveyed.
The vocabulary is worth naming. Earth-veins are a term of art from the practice of choosing where to build or bury — the lines along which the ground's force is supposed to run, and the reason a house faces the way it does. Applied here, it says somebody chose this spot deliberately and knew what they were choosing for.
The rhyme starts here and holds to one sound for the rest of the piece. Two of its four landings are the same written character read two different ways, which is the sort of thing the form permits and the eye does not notice.