驚得鳥難飛 Birds Could Not Fly
逐句解 Line by line
Fine jade flowers were trampled down for the sake of staying alive, / green moss was kicked through because it made the footing slip.
The couplet is oddly domestic in the middle of a battle: they are ruining the garden, and the poem gives a practical reason for each piece of damage. 琪花, jade flowers, are the flowers of the immortals' gardens — the same paradise the first verse run spent six lines praising, now being churned up underfoot.
They fought till the rosy light in the cave went dim, / and the sweet growing things on the cliff were beaten flat.
殺得 takes de, the connector that hangs a result on a verb — fought until. The destruction is running through the exact inventory of the earlier poem: the rosy light, the flowers, the moss, the cliff. The novel praised the place in one verse run so that it could be dismantled in the next.
The clash and clatter startled the birds so they could not fly, / the shouting frightened the beauty into running away.
乒乓 is a sound word for hard things knocking — the same one that gave modern Chinese its name for table tennis. 吆喝 is hè, shouting, and both 驚得 and 嚇得 take de: startled so they could not fly, frightened so she ran.
This is the poem's real business and the reason the paradise description had to come first. Six lines built the cave into an immortal's garden; three lines take it apart, item by item, in the same order.
The beauty running away is the last we hear of her until Wukong goes back in for her. She has no lines in the entire chapter — the only thing she does is get frightened, get caught and get killed, and the novel gives her the fate it usually reserves for the most decorative thing in the room.