遍地舞蜻蜓 Wax Moths And Dragonflies
只見：只见：
逐句解 Line by line
And here is what they saw:
Two characters, and the tenth and last set-piece of the chapter opens. This one is an insect swarm.
Wax-moths flying all over the sky; dragonflies dancing over all the ground.
抹蜡 is the wax-moth and 蜻蜓 the dragonfly, both named in the roster a few passages back. The couplet sets sky against ground, which is how it tells you there is no way out.
Honeybees and hornets after the forehead; lu-wasps stabbing at the eyes.
蠦 appears here for the fourth and last time in the chapter. 扎 is to stab or prick. The line moves from forehead to eyes, which is the order an insect swarm actually attacks a face in.
Blister-beetles biting front and back; ox-grasshoppers stinging above and below.
Both halves pair a direction with a bite: front and back, above and below. Between this line and the last, the four directions and the two planes are covered.
A blackness spreading over their faces; a whirring that would frighten gods and ghosts.
漫漫 and 翛翛 both double — spreading, and the dry whirr of wings. 神鬼驚 closes on the standard superlative: enough to frighten gods and ghosts. It is the chapter's last line of verse.
The chapter's last poem is a swarm, and it is built as a grid: sky and ground, forehead and eyes, front and back, above and below. By the fourth line there is nowhere left that is not insects.
All seven sons are named in it, in the order the roster gave them. The book introduced them as a pedantic list twenty passages ago — Bee is the honeybee, Dragonfly is the dragonfly — and here is what the list was for.
The rhyme is exact, four for four, on a single sound. That is worth recording because it is the last of ten set-pieces in this chapter and the pattern held all the way through: every regulated poem in Chapter 72 rhymes perfectly, and every sprawling rhapsody leaks somewhere.