月裡嫦娥 Moon Goddess Would Be Pleased
逐句解 Line by line
A round powdered face like a silver basin, / red lips smooth as a cherry.
The silver basin is a compliment, not a joke: a full round face was the Ming ideal, and 銀盆 is the standard image for it. The cherry mouth is equally fixed. Notice that the poem has now worked downward from hair to feet to hands to face, which is the conventional order of these portraits and not the order a person would actually look.
Upright and proper, the bearing of a beauty; / even the moon goddess would be pleased with her.
The comparison at the close is to 嫦娥, Chang E, who stole the elixir of immortality from her husband the archer Yi and fled to the moon, where she lives alone. Saying that Chang E herself would be delighted is the highest reach of this kind of praise. 喜恰 is a vernacular pleased-and-satisfied.
Today she has taken the monk who seeks the scriptures, / and means to have her pleasure and share his pillow and couch.
And the last line drops the register entirely, which is the whole design. Four lines of stock beauty and then a plain statement of intent. 朝 is zhāo here, morning and so today, not the cháo of a court. 枕榻 is pillow and couch, and the pairing means exactly what it appears to mean.
The portrait's last line is the one that matters. A reader who has been enjoying four lines of conventional loveliness is handed the reason for it in the fifth, and the beauty retrospectively becomes equipment. This is a trap dressed for a wedding.
Chang E is a pointed choice for the closing comparison. She is the woman who took the drug of immortality for herself and has been alone on the moon ever since — a figure of both supreme beauty and a stolen elixir. A fiend who wants to take something life-giving from a monk is being measured against her, and the fit is closer than flattery.
The chapter's title is doing its work here too. The fair girl seeks the yang: in the language of inner alchemy the adept guards his vital essence and the demonic partner tries to draw it off. What the verse presents as a wedding night, the couplet has already labelled as theft.