Look at him:

Three characters carrying a subject and a verb, so the tag opens the description from inside its own unit. The narrative that revealed the creature stays outside the poem: prose may join a recitation only when it is grammatically part of it.

Eyes that shoot the stars of dawn, a nose that snorts the morning mist.

朝 is zhāo, morning — not the cháo, "facing towards," that the same character takes twice in this chapter's prose. It answers 曉星 in the clause before: dawn stars, morning mist. And this rhapsody, unlike the chapter's other two, does not rhyme at all — its eight closing characters run across six different endings and all four tones, where the monk's piece held one rhyme for ten units and the Daoist's for nine. It is built on balance alone, which means nothing in it can be settled by rhyme.

Teeth ranked close as blades of steel, claws curved into hooks of gold.

Both halves open on a doubled adjective and close on a metal — the kind of symmetry this piece uses in place of rhyme.

On its head a single horn of flesh, for all the world as though a thousand thousand pieces of agate had been heaped into it; over its body a spread of red scales, just as if ten thousand thousand flakes of rouge had been laid up in courses.

攢 is cuán, to gather into a mass — pinned corpus-wide, because automatic transcription supplies an unrelated reading. The two halves are one sentence cut by a semicolon and rejoined: a body-part verb, an object and a simile on each side, sixteen characters against sixteen.

Coiled on the ground, you would take it for a brocade coverlet; flying through the air, you would mistake it for a rainbow.

為 is wéi, "to be," after 疑, to suspect. Nothing here sits in a rhyme position, because the piece has none.

Where it lies at rest a rank smell goes up to heaven; when it stirs a red cloud covers its body.

腥氣, a rank animal smell, answers the stench of the lane a few segments back — the creature and the ground it has fouled get described in the same word.

Great? — so great that people on either side cannot see across; long? — so long that it straddles a whole hill from south to north.

長 is cháng both times, the size sense — the reading every one of the chapter's nine size-sense uses takes. Two more balanced members, ten characters each, joined across the semicolon that separates them.