老婦之形 The Old Woman's Form
好行者，拽開步，走近前觀看，那怪物：好行者，拽开步，走近前观看，那怪物：
逐句解 Line by line
Good Pilgrim! Striding out, he went up close to look — and the monster was:
拽開步 is to lengthen the stride, to set off briskly. Then the colon, which means a poem is coming — this time a portrait of ugliness, built to stand against the portrait of beauty earlier in the chapter. (觀 is guān; 那 points, nà.)
Falsely turned into an old dame, her temples like ice and snow.
The very first character of the poem is 假, false. That is the difference between this portrait and the earlier one: the beauty-verse never admitted its subject was a fraud, and this one says so before it says anything else. 兩鬢如冰雪 — the hair at both temples like ice and snow.
Her gait slow and dragging, her steps frail and faltering.
慢騰騰 and 虛怯怯 — draggingly slow, frailly hesitant — are doubled words of the kind Chinese uses to turn an adjective into a texture. You can hear the shuffle in them. And what is being described is not an old woman but an impersonation of one, done very well. (行步 takes 行 as xíng.)
A weak frame, thin and spindly; a face like a withered vegetable leaf.
伶仃 (líng dīng) is thin and solitary, spindly. And look what the face is compared to: 枯菜葉, a dried-up vegetable leaf. The maiden got jade and crabapple blossom; this one gets something from the bottom of the basket. The two poems run the same machinery in opposite directions.
Her cheekbones jutting upward, her lips curling down.
Cheekbones tilting up, lips twisting down. It is very nearly a cartoon — two lines and you could draw the face — and that precision is the demon showing her workmanship.
Old age is not as youth once was: her whole face was folds, like the creases of a lotus leaf.
The closing couplet says the obvious thing plainly, that old age is not what youth was, and then produces the one really fine image in the poem: a face folded all over like the creases in a lotus leaf. Anybody who has watched a lotus pad crumple at the edges will recognise it at once. (少 in 少年 is shào, "young".)
This poem is the deliberate mirror of the beauty-verse that introduced the first disguise. Where that piece deployed every convention of loveliness — jade fingers, willow brows, crabapple and peony — this one runs through the conventions of decrepitude: snowy temples, a spindly frame, jutting cheekbones, a face folded like a lotus leaf. Together the two portraits map the demon's range, and the reader's double vision.
The crucial difference is candour. The beauty-verse never confessed its subject a fraud. This one opens on the word 假, falsely turned into an old dame, naming the disguise as disguise in its first three characters. Having once let the mask stand, the narrator now lifts it for us while the pilgrims, Wukong excepted, stay deceived — a small shift that keeps the reader permanently a step ahead of the master's error.
On the build: the one-line prose tag ending 那怪物 is joined to the poem it introduces, with each couplet set as its own line. It follows the mountain rhapsody and the two poems that brought on the maiden; the third disguise will be given a set-piece of its own in due course.