森森兵器 Weapons Ranked In Rows
只見那裡森森兵器擺列著：只见那里森森兵器摆列着：
逐句解 Line by line
"I only saw their weapons ranked out there thick as a wood:
The announcement sits at the tail of the prose and opens the set-piece from inside its own sentence. 森森 is the doubling used of trees standing close together, and the muster poem applied it to the troops themselves a scene ago — so the weapons are being described in the same words as the men holding them.
Bows, arrows, sabres, spears, armour and coats; shield and halberd, sword and trident, with tasselled standards.
Fourteen characters, of which twelve name a thing and two are joining words. The four line-ends of this piece rhyme on qí, lí, kuī and chuí — and this opening line rhymes at its midpoint instead, on 衣, so the scheme is set half a line before its first line-end.
Light javelins, moon-shovels, helmets and mail; great axes, round bucklers, iron caltrops.
兜鍪 is the older word for a helmet and 鎧 the older word for mail — the line reaches for archaic vocabulary in the middle of a list otherwise made of perfectly ordinary hardware.
Long cudgels, short bludgeons, steel forks, blunderbusses, planes and headpieces.
長 is cháng, and the pair 長悶棍，短窩槌 breaks the metre into three and three. It is the only place the piece leaves its seven-character line, and it does it to get long and short into the same breath.
And for dress: leather-shafted boots, head-guards and padded jackets; tablet-whips, sling-pellets, and maces of bronze."
得 is the light de. 彈 is dàn, a pellet for a sling, not the tán of flicking something. The boots are named with a character so rare that many fonts have no shape for it and will show a box instead — 䩺, third in this line, read wēng. The 1716 dictionary files it under the leather radical and glosses it as what the people of Wu call the shaft of a boot.
Fifty-eight characters and something like thirty separate objects, and not one number anywhere in it. Asked how many soldiers, Wukong answers with a catalogue of equipment — and the effect is of an army too large to count, described by a man too frightened to try.
The list is also carefully useless. Bows and spears and axes and caltrops tell the demon nothing he could plan against: no order of battle, no disposition, no estimate. It is an inventory of a hardware shop, delivered as though it were reconnaissance.
The metre gives the game away in one place. Everything runs seven characters to the line until long-cudgels and short-bludgeons breaks it into three and three, and the reason is that the poet wanted the two adjectives side by side. It is the only moment in the piece about anything other than accumulation.