現身抿耳 He Came When His Master Called
逐句解 Line by line
Many a time when hungry he sought out the herb garden, / and some mornings when thirsty drank at the trickling clouds.
The poem turns to the deer's life before all this, and it is a life of medicine gardens and cloud-water — the diet of an immortal's animal. 藥圃, the herb garden, is where the Longevity Star grows the ingredients of long life, which makes it quietly pointed: this creature was raised among the real medicines and went off to invent a fake one. 朝 is zhāo, morning: 有朝 means 'one of these mornings', and it is the same word behind the everyday 有朝一日.
With the years he learned the art of flying up, / with the days he perfected a changing face.
學得 and 修成 are the vocabulary of Daoist self-cultivation, used here with no irony at all. He did the work. Centuries beside a god's herb garden, and what he acquired was flight and a face that could be swapped.
Now, seeing the place his master called him from, / he shows his body, lays back his ears and bows to the dust.
抿耳, ears laid flat, is the one detail in the poem that is purely animal — no deer decides to do that. After four lines about cultivation and transformation, the creature is described by a reflex.
Four lines of biography for a character who has just lost the ability to speak, and the novel gives them straight, without mockery. He was hungry, he was thirsty, he studied, he learned to fly. It is the most sympathetic thing in the chapter and it arrives after everything he did is known.
The last line settles the question of what he is. Not a fallen minister or a wicked adviser: an animal that comes when its owner calls, and puts its ears back doing it. Everything else was learned.