手提寶劍 Sword In Hand
只見他：只见他：
逐句解 Line by line
And this is what he saw:
The tag stands as its own three-character unit at the end of a long prose line, so the tag alone opens the poem. What follows runs to two stanzas, one for each line of the source.
On her head a kerchief of rounded flowers; on her body a cloud-robe of stitched brocade.
團花 is a pattern of roundels; 納錦 is brocade worked with close stitching. The portrait opens on textiles rather than on weapons, and stays there for three of its four couplets.
At her waist a double-bound sash of tiger sinew, letting the embroidered skirt and its slanted gauze just show.
虎觔絛 is a cord of tiger sinew — 觔 is jīn, a variant of 筋. The same sash turns up round the Great Sage's own waist in the standard description of him. 微露, "barely revealing," keeps 露 at the literary lù.
Phoenix-beaked bow-shoes of three cùn; dragon-whisker leggings worked with gold.
弓鞋 are the shoes worn on a bound foot, and 三寸 is the proverbial measure of it — a cùn runs to about three centimetres, so this is the "three-inch golden lotus" of the period's own advertising. The detail places her socially as a lady rather than a monster, which is the whole point of the couplet. 金銷 is gold thread worked into the cloth.
A treasure sword in her hand, her angry voice pitched high — of fiercer aspect than the Moon Hag herself.
月婆 is obscure. The likeliest reading is the folk figure of a woman in her lying-in month, proverbially haggard and short-tempered; some commentators would identify it instead with 月孛, the malevolent star-deity of Daoist astrology, conventionally shown as a wild-haired woman. The source reads 婆 and is followed here. Only this last couplet arms her; the first three dressed her.
The portrait spends three of its four couplets on clothing. A flowered kerchief, a brocade cloud-robe, a tiger-sinew sash, an embroidered skirt showing beneath, bow-shoes of three cùn, leggings worked with gold thread. This is the wardrobe of a lady of standing, described with the attention the novel usually reserves for immortals and imperial consorts.
The bound feet are the detail that fixes her. 弓鞋三寸 places the Rākṣasī inside the social world of the reader's own gentry households rather than in the bestiary. She is the Bull Demon King's principal wife, styled Princess by her neighbours, and she dresses the part.
Only the closing couplet gives her a weapon, and it does so at the moment her voice rises. The comparison it reaches for — fiercer than a 月婆 — is obscure enough that commentators disagree about it, but the shape of the insult is plain: the fiercest kind of woman a reader could be expected to picture. Set against six lines of silk and gold, the effect is of a lady who has just picked up swords, which is exactly what has happened.