原文 Original text
繁體 Traditional
Reader's edition
泰極否還生 When Peace Peaks Trouble Returns
此一去，豈知歡喜之間愁又至。經云：「泰極否還生。」時運相逢真太歲，又值喪門吊客星。此一去，岂知欢喜之间愁又至。经云：「泰极否还生。」时运相逢真太岁，又值丧门吊客星。
逐句解 Line by line
此一去，豈知歡喜之間愁又至。
此一去，岂知欢喜之间愁又至。
Going on so, who could have known that in the midst of the gladness a grief was coming?
間 reads jiān — in the middle of, between.
經云：「泰極否還生。」
经云：「泰极否还生。」
As the classic says: when peace is at its height, stagnation comes to life again.
否 reads pǐ, not fǒu. 泰 and 否 are the eleventh and twelfth hexagrams of the 易經, a matched pair meaning flourishing and blockage. 還 keeps hái, again.
時運相逢真太歲，又值喪門吊客星。
时运相逢真太岁，又值丧门吊客星。
The turn of the times has brought him up against the Year Star itself, and the Mourning Gate and the Guest of Grief besides.
相 reads xiāng in 相逢, to meet. 太歲 is the counter-Jupiter of the calendar, whose direction you avoided; 喪門 and 吊客 are ill-omened stars in the almanac.
This couplet runs a perfect seven characters and seven, and it is prose. The chapter's actual poems are set apart on the page; this one sits in the middle of a narrative line. Ming prose is full of matched couplets like it, and reading them as verse because they scan is one of the easiest mistakes a reader can make.
The saying quoted is from the Book of Changes and it names two hexagrams. The eleventh is Peace, heaven below and earth above, so that the two are moving toward each other; the twelfth is Stagnation, the same trigrams reversed, so that they move apart. They are the classic pair for good times and bad, and the whole point of them is that each turns into the other.
The three stars named next all come out of the household almanac. The Year Star is the invisible counter-Jupiter whose quarter of the sky you avoided when building or travelling; the Mourning Gate and the Guest of Grief are the two that mark deaths and condolence visits. The narrator is not being poetic here — he is reading the pilgrims' fortune out of a calendar anyone in the audience would have had at home, and the reading is as bad as it gets.