一氣無冬夏 One Breath No Winter
逐句解 Line by line
One breath through it, knowing neither winter nor summer; three autumns long, and it pours out spring for ever.
一氣 is one breath, one continuous flow — and yì rather than yī, because the character after it falls. 三秋 is three autumns, a stock way of saying a long stretch of time. The line sets the seasons against a thing that has none.
Burning waves like a cauldron on the boil; snow-white breakers fresh as new-run broth.
湯 is tāng, hot water or broth — the old sense, and the reason a hot spring is a 湯泉. The couplet puts fire and snow in one picture because that is what a hot spring looks like: white water, boiling.
Divided channels feed the standing grain; still pools wash off the dust of the world.
分 is fēn, dividing — the parallel half has 停流, still flow, so both are modifier plus noun and 分 is doing the modifying. 俗塵, the dust of the common world, is a Buddhist and Daoist term for everything the water is being asked to rinse off.
The poem about the water is the seventh set-piece in this chapter, and the rhyme in it does not miss once across seven lines.
The middle couplet is the good one. A hot spring genuinely does look like both things at the same time — white as snow on the surface, boiling underneath — and the poem gets it in ten characters by simply putting the two words next to each other without explaining.
And then the third couplet turns practical. The water irrigates crops and washes off worldly dust: it feeds people and it cleans them. The spring is being praised as useful, which is not where a poem about miraculous water usually ends up.