五彩盈門 Five Colours Fill The Door
敘不了，只見報道：「宴已完備。」好素宴：叙不了，只见报道：「宴已完备。」好素宴：
逐句解 Line by line
Before they had finished talking a report came in: "The banquet is ready."
敘不了 — the talking was not done. The narrator cuts off the Longevity Star's confession mid-conversation, and the reader never hears what the table said about it.
A fine vegetarian banquet it was:
Three characters, and the audience knows sixteen lines of verse are coming. 素, plain or unadorned, is the word for food without meat — everything that follows is by definition austere, which is the joke the poem spends sixteen lines making.
Five colours filling the doorway, strange scents crowding the seats.
The poem opens on the room rather than the food. 五彩, the five colours — blue-green, red, yellow, white and black — is the standard set in Chinese thought, matched to the five phases and the five directions. Saying a doorway is full of them means it is decorated to the limit.
Tables hung with embroidered valances bright as brocade, floors laid with red carpet glinting like sunset cloud.
繡緯 is the embroidered cloth hung along the front edge of a banquet table, which is where a Chinese host put his display. The couplet moves table then floor, high then low, which is how these poems usually work through a room.
The banquet poem is one of the novel's fixed set pieces and this is a long example — sixteen lines and one hundred and eighty-five characters, the densest stretch of verse in the chapter.
It also has a job beyond decoration. The kingdom of Bhikṣu has spent three years buying children by the cage; the way it apologises is by putting on a feast, and the poem measures the apology in detail. Every item is an item of expenditure.