彷彿似飛塵 Like Chaos Before Creation
逐句解 Line by line
Of the sun's colour there was no trace at all; of birdsong there was nowhere any to be heard.
The poem works by subtraction — no sun, no birds — where the mountain poem worked by accumulation. Everything the earlier set-piece put on the mountain is now being taken off it one item at a time.
It was for all the world like the primal chaos; it seemed like nothing so much as flying dust.
混沌 is the undivided murk before heaven and earth separated — the oldest thing in the Chinese account of how the world began, and the fog is being compared to the condition of the universe before there was anything to see. 宛然 and 彷彿 are both two-character words for seeming, set at the head of matching lines.
The trees on the hilltop could not be seen; nowhere would you meet a gatherer of herbs.
那 is nǎ, the rhetorical where — where would you meet one, meaning nowhere. The rhyme runs on 昏, 聞, 塵 and 人, four for four. The herb gatherer is the stock figure who wanders mountains in Chinese verse, and the poem's last move is to say that even he is not here.
Eight lines of five characters, rhyming four for four, and every image is a cancellation. No sun, no birdsong, no trees, no herb gatherer. The fog is described entirely by what it has removed.
Comparing it to the primal chaos is a large claim for a patch of weather, and the poem means it. What is coming out of this fog will take the master off his horse in the middle of the road with nobody able to see it happen.