不見斗星 Vine and Kudzu Knotted
逐句解 Line by line
Creeper comes to bind the kudzu: east and west, no traveller can get through;
The rhapsody says its own line over again and then finishes the thought — like a speaker repeating a phrase before drawing the conclusion from it.
kudzu goes to bind the creeper: north and south, how is a merchant to pass?
The two lines take the tangled couplet from the passage before and give each half a consequence. The verse is arguing, not just describing: this is what the tangle does to people who need to be somewhere.
Live half a year in this wood and how would you tell day from month;
Another question-word 那, read nǎ — "how would you," not "there." The wood is dark enough to swallow the calendar.
walk a few lǐ and you would not see the Dipper.
斗 is dǒu, the Northern Dipper — the constellation you steer by. Losing sight of it is the traveller's version of losing the compass, and it pairs with the lost calendar in the line above: no time, no direction.
These four lines are the practical heart of the rhapsody. Everything else describes what the wood looks like; this says what it does to you. Traders cannot cross it, travellers cannot get through it, and once inside you lose both the date and the north.
The Dipper is the sharper of the two losses. Chinese travellers navigated by it, and a wood thick enough to hide it is a wood you cannot walk out of by dead reckoning. The narrator will confirm this in plain prose shortly: half a day in, and no sign of the way out.