幽鹿步徐徐 Deer Stepping Slowly
逐句解 Line by line
Fragrant orchids surround a stone house, sweet grasses light the rock corner.
巖嵎 is the angle or nook of a cliff — 嵎 is a rare character for a mountain corner, and it is rare enough that 中原音韻 does not carry it at all; its rime had to be taken from its homophone group. It still lands in 魚模 with the other nine.
Running water joins the stream in green, cloud seals the ancient trees in emptiness.
封 is to seal or close up — cloud lying on trees so thickly that it shuts them in. And 虛, emptiness, is the rhyme word: a Daoist term of art doing duty as a description of mist.
Wild birds cry in a clatter, secluded deer step slow and slow.
聒 is guō, a din — a reading settled earlier in this project against the automatic guā, and sealed twice in the previous chapter. Both halves close on a doubled character: 聒聒 noisy-noisy, 徐徐 slow-slow. The line pairs racket against stillness and gives each a doubling to sit on.
Tall bamboo, branch on branch, stands fine; red plum, leaf on leaf, unfurls.
Two more doublings, and this time they are distributive rather than intensifying: 枝枝 means every branch, 葉葉 every leaf. Chinese can double a noun to mean each and all of it, which English manages only with a preposition.
Four couplets of pure landscape and not one of them is idle. Orchids and stone, water and cloud, birds and deer, bamboo and plum — the piece works down a conventional list and the convention is the point: this is what an immortal's grounds are supposed to contain, and they contain it.
The doubled characters are doing two different jobs in two consecutive lines, which is the kind of thing this poet enjoys. 聒聒 and 徐徐 intensify — noisy-noisy, slow-slow. 枝枝 and 葉葉 distribute — branch by branch, leaf by leaf. Same device, opposite grammar, adjacent lines.
And 虛 sits in the middle of it, meaning emptiness. In a description of mist on old trees it is just weather. In a Daoist's garden it is also the central term of the whole philosophy, and the poem is perfectly happy for it to be both at once.