After we were wed, I wished to slaughter that tiger and call all our kin to the feast; but it was Her Highness the princess who bade me spare it. For the reason she gave against the killing, she had some lines of verse — and very well she spoke them — saying:

The prose lead-in to a couplet. 欲將那虎 takes the 將 that marks the object as jiāng and 那 as pointing nà; 道得甚好 takes the structural 得 as de and 甚好, "very well," with 甚 as shèn. 教, "bade," is jiào. He is about to quote his wife — in a story she never lived through.

By the warrant of Heaven, by the warrant of Earth, we were made husband and wife; with neither matchmaker nor witness, our marriage was joined.

托天托地, entrusting it to Heaven and to Earth, makes the cosmos itself the guarantor of the match; 無媒無證, "without go-between or witness," admits the marriage had none of the proper forms while claiming a higher authority instead. It is a good argument. It is also being made by the wrong person for the wrong reason.

In a former life the red cord once bound our feet; and now the old tiger is made our matchmaker."

And here is the image everybody knows. 赤繩繫足 points at the tale of the Old Man under the Moon (月下老人), who ties the ankles of destined couples together with a red cord — the standard picture of a marriage settled before either party was born, and still the figure Chinese uses for fated love. 今將老虎 takes 將 as jiāng. The joke in the couplet is that it appoints the tiger, the agent of her abduction, as the matchmaker of fate.