父母徒張皇 The Parents Could Only Panic
逐句解 Line by line
The cold air went into people — how could they put their heads out? The chill struck through the body and clothes were like iron.
The poem drops out of the sky and into a doorway. Everything so far has been seen from above; this line is what it was like to be standing in it.
Fathers and mothers could only flap and panic; elder brothers and their wives were all cut to the heart.
徒 tú is the bitter little word meaning in vain, to no purpose — they panicked and it made no difference. The naming of 兄嫂, elder brother and elder brother's wife, is not decorative: in a Chinese household those are the people who actually raise the youngest children.
Over all the ground the shade-wind rolled; the coops were carried off by spirits.
Ten characters, and the operation is complete. In 籠兒 the 兒 is a suffix, making a little basket of a basket, exactly as it made a little bee of a bee when Wukong went to look in the coops. It is ér all the same — the reading all thirty-one in this chapter take, whether the character is a suffix or the word for a child.
Though that night they were desolate and alone, by daybreak they would all be glad.
The poem breaks its own frame to reassure the reader, which is a thing Chinese verse of this kind does freely. 孤恁 gū xī is a rare pair meaning forlorn and comfortless. The line is telling you the ending before the chapter gets there, because the point of the poem is not suspense — it is that the parents did not know.
This is the passage the chapter needed and could not have got from prose. The rescue is entirely good and entirely terrifying to the people it is happening to, and only verse can hold both at once.
The word for in vain is doing the heaviest work. The parents flap and panic and it changes nothing, and everything they cannot do is being done for them by beings they cannot see. The chapter has already established that these parents were forbidden to weep. Now they are not even allowed to be the ones who save their children.
And then the last line simply tells you it will be all right. It is a strange, generous move — the poem stepping outside the night to say that morning comes — and it is aimed at the reader rather than at anyone in the story.