英雄威武 Who Is Knocking At The Door
逐句解 Line by line
Golden mail on his body without a thread of a seam, a dragon-sash bound at his waist with a clever catch.
絛 is a woven silk cord or sash — the demon is dressed with some care. 見機 is a small trick or contrivance, the working part of a fastening.
In his hand a steel sabre, glittering and glinting; a hero's dignity, rare in this world.
明晃晃 is one of those three-character shapes Chinese makes by doubling the tail of an adjective, and it does the work of an adverb and a sound effect together. The sabre named here gets a whole poem of its own two passages from now.
One bellow like a thunderclap, and he demanded: who is that knocking at the door?
喝 is hè, a shout — the character only reads hē when it means drinking. And notice the punctuation: an inner pair of brackets closes before the question mark, so the closing bracket and the question mark stack up at the very end of a verse line. It is the only site of its kind in the chapter.
Six lines and the rhyme never wavers: 輝, 飛, 齊, 機, 稀, 誰 — all in the same sound family. Ming verse of this kind holds one rhyme from beginning to end, and the discipline is part of the pleasure, like a bassline that does not change.
The closing question is a nice piece of staging. The whole portrait has been silent description, and then the subject of it speaks, and what he says is the most ordinary sentence imaginable: who is at the door. The poem hands him back to the plot.