四方如潑墨 Black Mist Covers The Sky
好風：好风：
逐句解 Line by line
A fine wind it was:
The tag that introduces a set-piece verse, and it is never parted from the lines it announces.
Black mist curtains the sky to darkness, grieving cloud shines the earth to dusk.
愁雲, sorrowing cloud, gives the weather a mood — a standard move in this kind of description, where the sky is made to feel what the scene means.
On all four sides it is as though ink were flung; one wash of indigo, thickly laid.
潑墨, flung ink, is the name of a real technique in Chinese painting — ink poured or splashed rather than drawn. The poem is describing the night as a painting being made.
When it first blows it raises the dust and scatters the soil; afterwards it topples the trees and breaks the woods.
倒 is dǎo here, to fell or topple, not the dào of inverting or of on the contrary. The line divides the wind into two stages, and the next line will pick up both halves in order.
A wind poem of the classic kind, and this one is built with unusual care. The third line names two stages, dust first and then trees, and the fourth line takes them up again in the same order.
The painting metaphor is the best thing in it. Ink flung across the sky and a single wash of indigo laid thick — the poet is describing darkness by describing how one would paint darkness.
It is worth remembering what this wind announces. Not a storm: a young woman walking into a hall. The novel spends nine lines of cosmic upheaval on the arrival of someone who has been sleeping in the building for three nights.