The third line of The Well (King Wen 48) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as the well cleared out yet unused, occasion for grief, though the water might still be drawn if the king were only wise. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns a town may be changed while the fashion of its wells is never changed, the well neither decreasing nor increasing, and all who come and go draw from it and are benefited, and this line supplies one stage of that larger reading rather than a complete statement on its own.
Structurally the line stands at the topmost place of the lower trigram Xun, wind in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Kan, water in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads water above wood; the superior man comforts the people and stimulates them to help one another, and the third line takes its place inside that combined picture of Xun below and Kan above.
Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Xun is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, The Well Cleared Out Yet Unused, as the concrete case through which the hexagram's abstract judgment becomes visible in a single situation rather than a general principle.