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 (zhuài kāi bù) "striding out, quickening the pace." 觀看 (guān kàn) "to look," 觀 (guān). 那怪物 (nà guài wù) "that monster," 那 (nà). The verse-tag lead-in ushers in the descriptive poem — deliberately paired against the beauty-verse of the first disguise.
Falsely turned into an old dame, her temples like ice and snow.
假變 (jiǎ biàn) "falsely transformed." 兩鬢如冰雪 (liǎng bìn rú bīng xuě) "the hair at both temples white as ice and snow." The verse opens by insisting on the falsity (假) — a pointed contrast to the beauty-poem, which never let slip that its loveliness was a lie.
Her gait slow and dragging, her steps frail and faltering.
慢騰騰 (màn téng téng) "slowly, draggingly"; 虛怯怯 (xū qiè qiè) "weakly, timorously." 行步 (xíng bù) "walking, gait," 行 (xíng). The reduplicatives render the shuffling frailty of great age — the demon's craft in miming decrepitude.
A weak frame, thin and spindly; a face like a withered vegetable leaf.
伶仃 (líng dīng) "spindly, gaunt." 枯菜葉 (kū cài yè) "a withered vegetable leaf" — a homely, unlovely simile, the exact inverse of the flower-and-jade figures lavished on the maiden.
Her cheekbones jutting upward, her lips curling down.
顴骨望上翹 (quán gǔ wàng shàng qiào) "cheekbones tilting up"; 嘴唇往下別 (zuǐ chún wǎng xià biè) "lips twisting down." The features are drawn with an almost caricatural exactness — the collapsed, angular face of the very old.
Old age is not as youth once was: her whole face was folds, like the creases of a lotus leaf.
老年不比少年時 (lǎo nián bù bǐ shào nián shí) "old age is not like the time of youth," 少 (shào) (少年 "youth"). 荷葉摺 (hé yè zhé) "the creases of a lotus leaf," for the wrinkles. The closing couplet states the theme plainly — the ravages of age — completing a portrait whose ugliness is as conventional as the earlier beauty, and as false.
This descriptive verse is the deliberate mirror-image of the beauty-poem that introduced the first disguise. Where that piece deployed every convention of loveliness — jade fingers, willow brows, crabapple and peony — this one catalogues the conventions of decrepitude: snowy temples, a spindly frame, jutting cheekbones, a face folded like a wrinkled lotus leaf. The two portraits frame 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 from the first line. The narrator, having once let the mask stand, now lifts it for the reader even as the pilgrims (save Wukong) remain deceived — a small shift that keeps us always a step ahead of the master's error.
Formally this is the batch's 含詞賦 passage: the one-line prose tag ending 那怪物： is joined to the poem it introduces, each couplet set as its own verse line. It is the third of the chapter's set-piece verses, after the mountain rhapsody and the maiden's portrait, and the last of the disguises to be given full poetic treatment.