The poem says:

The tag proper, two characters, and it may not be parted from the verse it introduces.

An evil ruler, unknowing, has lost the true and upright; greedy for pleasure, unaware, he secretly wounds himself.

不省 bù xǐng is not to examine oneself — the same character as in the Confucian discipline of daily self-examination. The charge is not that the king is cruel but that he has stopped looking at what he is doing.

Seeking everlasting life, he butchers the lives of children; to lift a heavenly scourge, he kills the small people.

戈 qiāng is a heavy classical word for slaughter. 為 is wèi, in order to. The second line is bitter: 天災, a calamity sent by heaven, is what the king thinks his illness is, and the cure he has chosen is the surest way to earn one.

The monk, moved to compassion, cannot bear to let it go; the officer, speaking of the danger, cannot bear to be heard.

The couplet sets the chapter's two decent men side by side and gives them the same verb of endurance, 難 and 不堪 — one cannot bear to walk away, the other cannot bear what he has had to say.

Before the lamp he sheds tears and heaves a long sigh: grief has felled the man who sits in meditation and turns to the Buddha.

長 is cháng here — a long sigh — one of the eight places in this chapter where the character leaves its commoner zhǎng. 倒 is dǎo, to fall over: stacked after a verb it turns the action into a collapse. And 灑 is sǎ, simply to shed.