金蓮三寸窄 Three Inches Of Golden Lotus
逐句解 Line by line
Elbows and upper arms outdoing spread ice; fragrant shoulders you would think were moulded out of powder.
賽 is to outdo in a contest, 疑 is to take for — the two halves work by beating a comparison and then by mistaking one thing for another. Both are standard moves of this form.
Bellies soft and yielding; backs smooth and clean.
脊 is jǐ in 脊背, the back — not jí, which belongs to the ridge-beam sense and to the wagtail. 還 is hái, and besides.
Knees and wrists half a span round; golden lotuses three inches narrow.
金蓮 for the fourth time in the chapter, and here it comes with the measurement: 三寸, three cùn. Three inches is the notorious ideal for a bound foot, and the poem gives it as a compliment. The Chinese unit stays Chinese; a 寸 of this period is close to a modern inch.
And at the middle, one stretch of feeling; showing the hollow where romance lives.
中 is zhōng and 間 is jiān — the middle of the body. 風流穴 is a euphemism and the poem stops there. Six lines, and the last one is the only one that is not about a surface.
The poem works downward, part by part, and stops where it stops. It is the most uncomfortable set-piece in the chapter and it is written with complete conventionality — every image borrowed, nothing invented.
The foot measurement is the detail worth knowing. Three inches is the notorious target of foot-binding, the practice that broke and folded girls' feet from childhood so they would fit a shoe of that length. The poem states it as praise, in the same breath as the shoulders and the wrists, because its period did.
Something is worth saying about the rhyme here. All six line-endings were once clipped syllables in a tone Mandarin no longer has, and five of the six sat in one old rhyme group. Read aloud today they chime not at all. The poem is exactly as tightly built as the ones about the hot spring and the ball game; the sound that held it together has simply left the language.