毛猶霜雪 Feathers Like Frost And Snow
逐句解 Line by line
Feathers like frost and snow; eyes like the bright stars.
Eight characters, four and four — the shortest opening a set-piece gets in this chapter, matched by three of the others. The two comparisons are cold and distant, which is the point of an eagle.
Where the demon fox sees him, its souls all flee; when the cunning hare meets him, its gall is emptied out with fright.
處 is chù, the place where. 魂 is one of the several souls a person was held to have, and losing them is the standard way of saying terrified. The gall bladder was the seat of courage, so an emptied gall is a drained nerve.
Steel talons keen at the edge; a bold shape and a fierce air across him.
爪 is zhǎo here and the base agrees — which matters, because the very next passage has 利爪 where the base gives zhuǎ instead. Same character, same sense, two lines apart, and only one of them comes out right on its own.
He can put an old fist to work to fill his belly; he never grudges chasing a thing down with his own hands through the air.
供 is gōng, to supply. 老拳, the old fist, is a comic touch in the middle of a fearsome portrait — the bird is being given a boxer's vocabulary.
Ten thousand li of cold sky he follows up and down; through the clouds he picks out his object and goes where he pleases.
行 is xíng, to go — the twenty-fifth of the chapter's forty, and every one of the forty is xíng. 里 stays plain li. The closing line gives the bird the whole sky, which is what the next sentence needs him to have.
The eagle gets a full portrait — five lines, rhyming on one sound throughout — and it is entirely serious. Frost, snow, stars, steel talons, terrified foxes.
One joke is buried in the fourth line. The bird uses an old fist to feed itself, which is boxing vocabulary dropped into a bestiary description. Everything else in the poem is cold and remote and then for two characters the eagle is a brawler.
The talon word is worth watching across the next two passages. It appears here and again a few characters later in exactly the same sense, and the automatic reading gets one right and the other wrong. That is the ordinary condition of this text: the same character in the same meaning, behaving differently depending on what sits beside it.