這一場好殺 A Fine Battle This Was
這一場好殺：这一场好杀：
逐句解 Line by line
A fine battle this was:
場 is cháng, the counting word for an event and its whole course — a bout of something — not the chǎng that means a place. The phrase is folded into its own line rather than standing alone, and it is the storyteller's signal that a battle poem is starting.
The savage fiend plied his arms; the Pilgrim sought for troops.
Four characters and four, laying out the two halves the rest of the poem will expand. 行 is xíng.
The savage fiend plied his arms, usurping a jewelled tower and setting up images of the Buddha; the Pilgrim sought for troops, journeying far to a precious precinct to borrow dragon gods.
The edition cuts this at a semicolon and the two halves are set together here: four characters and seven, against four and seven, with the same shape both times. Each half quotes one line of the couplet before it and then adds seven more — the poem is glossing itself.
Tortoise and Snake brought forth water and fire; the fiend set knife and spear in motion.
Tortoise and Snake against the fiend, the elements against the weapons. The poem keeps the two sides in strict parallel from beginning to end.
The five dragons came by command to the western road; the Pilgrim, for his master's sake, brought up the rear.
在後收 puts into verse what the prose said a moment ago — bringing up the rear. The poem is not describing Monkey as the leader of this battle.
Swords and halberds, bright with light, shook out coloured lightning; spears and knives, flashing clear, glinted like a rainbow.
晃 is huǎng, dazzling, rather than huàng, swaying — the weapons are catching the light, not wobbling.
This one's wolf-tooth club was strong for all that it was short and pliant; that one's gold-banded rod went as he willed and answered his heart.
Set together at the edition's semicolon: five characters and four against five and four, with 這個 answered by 那個 — this one, that one — and each weapon named in the same slot.
One heard only the crack and thud of it, a noise like firecrackers, and a ringing measure like the striking of metal.
得 is dé in 只聽得, the reading sealed chapters give this phrase every time it appears. 扢撲 and 叮噹 are sound-words, crack-thud and ding-dong, and keep their ordinary readings.
Water and fire came together to campaign against the monster; knife and spear thronged and circled the sprite.
征 is the language of a punitive expedition rather than a brawl — a campaign authorised from above. It matches the warrant the dragons served before any fighting began.
The battle-cries startled the wolves and tigers; the uproar shook the ghosts and gods.
Five and five, the second of the poem's two couplets in that measure, placed where the noise is loudest. Only the opening line runs shorter.
The mêlée was just at the point where neither could win, when the fiend took out his treasure again.
當 is dāng and 處 is chù, a point or juncture. 又 — again — is the poem admitting that the reader has watched this move before.
The battle poem is built as a two-panel picture and says so in its first couplet: the savage fiend plies his arms, the Pilgrim goes for troops, four characters to each side. The couplet that follows quotes those two lines back and hangs seven more characters on each, so that the second unit is a gloss on the first.
What the balancing keeps insisting on is that this is a fight between a theft and a commission. The fiend 擅據 — seizes without right — while the dragons come 奉旨, under orders. Every couplet in the first half restates that opposition in different terms.
The last line breaks the pattern deliberately. Eleven couplets of balanced opposition end at the point where neither side can win — and then the fiend reaches for the bundle, which is not a weapon and answers nothing on the other side of the balance. The poem's symmetry collapses at exactly the moment the battle does.