南北成行 Ranked North and South
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逐句解 Line by line
Just look:
Two characters, and the second rhapsody of the chapter begins.
East and west they stand packed, / north and south they are ranked in rows.
Here 行 is háng, a rank or row, not the xíng of walking — the trees are drawn up like troops. Of the sixty times this character appears in the chapter, these two lines hold the only two that are rows.
East and west they stand packed, piercing the clouds; / north and south they are ranked in rows, invading the blue.
The couplet takes the two four-character phrases just used and stretches each into a seven-character line — a standard move in this kind of verse, like a musician stating a figure and then playing it long.
Close-set thorn and bramble knot themselves round about; / smartweed twines the branches, coiling above and below.
蓼 is smartweed, a scrambling waterside plant. Everything in this line is either knotting or coiling, and the trees are what it acts on.
Creeper comes to bind the kudzu, / kudzu goes to bind the creeper.
The line binds itself: 藤來纏葛 is answered by 葛去纏藤, ending where it began, with the two plants swapped. Chinese verse does this to imitate the thing described, and here the sentence is as tangled as the undergrowth.
The pine wood gets a longer and stranger rhapsody than the mountain did, and the difference in imagery is the whole point. The mountain was flowers and colours and birdsong. The wood is ranks, thorns, and things binding other things.
The military opening is deliberate. Trees packed east to west and ranked north to south are not scenery, they are a formation, and the reader is being shown something drawn up. Then the verse immediately abandons order for tangle — brambles knotting, smartweed coiling, creeper and kudzu binding each other in a line that loops back on itself.
That progression from ranks to snarl is how the wood works on the party. It looks navigable from outside. Once they are in it they spend half a day without finding a way out.