怎生模樣 Look at the Shape of Him
你看他怎生模樣：你看他怎生模样：
逐句解 Line by line
Look at the shape of him:
模 is mú in 模樣, a shape or a look — the everyday reading. As mó the same character is a mould or a template. The narrator turns to the audience and points, which is what this cue is for.
Bright and blazing, his patterned stripes many-coloured and gaudy; head high and bearing fierce, and every inch of him alert.
文斑 is patterned striping, which is the first hint of what this fiend is under the shape — the poem is describing a big cat and has not said so. 抖擻 is to shake yourself awake and be thoroughly on the alert; it survives in modern Chinese in exactly that sense.
Tusks thrusting from his mouth like steel drills; sharp claws hidden in the pads like hooks of jade.
鑽 is zuàn here, the tool — the dictionary splits the character so that the falling tone is the boring instrument and the level tone the act of boring, and a steel drill is an instrument. 爪 is zhǎo, the literary reading for a claw; the everyday zhuǎ belongs to an animal's paw in ordinary speech. 藏 is cáng, hidden, not the zàng of Tripitaka's name.
Golden eyes, pupils round, and the birds and beasts are afraid; silver whiskers standing on end, and ghosts and spirits grieve.
倒 is dào, inverted — the whiskers stand the wrong way up. It is not the dǎo of falling over, which this chapter also uses. The pairing of birds and beasts against ghosts and spirits covers the living world and the other one in fourteen characters.
Wild and raging he snarls and roars and looses his ferocity; belching fog and blowing wind, he works out his schemes.
哮 is xiào and 噯 is ǎi, to belch out. The rhyme closes on 擻, 鉤, 愁 and 謀 — four for four. And the last two characters are the point of the whole portrait: this one has a plan.
Eight lines of portrait and not one of them names the animal. Striped, tusked, clawed, golden-eyed, whiskered — a reader assembles a tiger or a leopard and the poem never confirms it. The novel is withholding the one fact that would tell you how dangerous he is.
The wind and the fog turn out to have been him, exactly as Tripitaka suspected and Pilgrim disproved. The poem puts the belching and blowing in the same line as the scheming, which is the sharper claim: the weather was not a symptom, it was a tactic.