倒樹摧林 Trees Down And Forests Broken
逐句解 Line by line
Dust raised and soil scattered, the starlight shows through; trees toppled and woods broken, the moon's colour dims.
倒 is dǎo again. The line repeats both halves of the previous one word for word and then adds a consequence to each — a technique of picking a phrase up and carrying it forward that Chinese verse uses constantly.
It blows so hard that: the Moon Goddess clutches her cassia tree tight, the jade hare runs round and round hunting his medicine bowl;
得 is the unstressed de, joining the blowing to the extent of it. 嫦娥 is the goddess who fled to the moon with a stolen elixir; the jade hare who pounds the drug of immortality beside her appeared in the night poem at the start of the chapter.
the officers of the nine luminaries all shut their doors, the dragon kings of the four seas all close theirs;
九曜, the nine luminaries, are the sun, moon, five planets and two eclipse points of Chinese and Indian astrology. The joke of the whole passage is that heaven's officials respond to a bad wind by going indoors.
The poem turns from weather to comedy, and the comedy is bureaucratic. A wind gets up, and the response of the celestial civil service is to shut the office doors.
The moon goddess clinging to her tree and the hare chasing his bowl round the lunar surface are genuinely funny images, and they work because these are the dignified figures of the night poem in the opening scene, now being blown about.
The line-linking is the technical pleasure here. Dust and trees in one line, dust and trees again at the head of the next with results attached. Chinese verse does this so naturally that English has to slow down to show it.