Three monks with staff and cudgel and rake; three demon fiends with their courage up.

The opening line breaks the pattern deliberately — three characters, then three, then seven, where the lines after it run seven and seven — all but one. It is the rhapsody — a long, unrhymed set-piece built of matched pairs of lines — clearing its throat: two quick beats to set the sides against each other before the metre settles. 膽氣加, their gall and spirit increased — the demons are not frightened by three armed monks, they are encouraged.

Battle-axe, steel sabre, and a knotted rattan rod; nothing to be heard but the wind's roar and the flying sand.

This is the hardest line in the chapter and the most rewarding. 藤紇䌋 is a rattan rod knobbled along its length, and the last character is used nowhere else in the novel. The word it belongs to is the everyday one for a lump or a knot, which modern Chinese writes 疙瘩 — and this novel spells it four different ways in four places, once as 紇繨 for a clod of grass, once as 紇絡 for a cranny, and twice here. The previous chapter wrote this very weapon 扢撻藤 and put it in the same line of the same formula: 鉞斧鋼刀, battle-axe and steel sabre, then the rattan. Ch.92 keeps the formula and reorders the rattan, putting the rare character at the break in the middle of the line. That is not the rhyming slot — the rhyme falls on the line's last character, and this poem rhymes there on one open sound the whole way down — but the rare character happens to land on that same sound anyway.

At the first few passes they blew out a fog of care; and after, soaring aloft, they scattered coloured cloud.

愁霧 is a fog of sorrow — weather made out of a feeling, which is how this novel always describes a serious fight. The pairing is exact: sorrow-fog below, bright cloud above.

The muckrake's whole repertoire went rolling with his body; the iron rod's heroic force was more than could be praised.

解數 is a set of martial moves — the sequence a fighter has drilled and can produce whole. The first character is read xiè here, not the commoner sound, and modern Chinese keeps the phrase alive in an idiom about using everything one has got. 更可誇 has that character as gèng, meaning "even more" — three passages after the same character meant the night-watch.

Few in this world can match the demon-quelling staff; yet the fiends' stubborn hearts would not give way to him.

降妖寶杖 is Sha Monk's weapon and the reading of its first character is the one to catch: xiáng, to subdue or bring to heel, not jiàng, to come down. This chapter uses that character nineteen times and it takes the subduing sound at fifteen of them — it is the word the whole rescue is about.

The battle-axe with bright edge and sharp-pointed butt; the rattan rod knotted at every joint and flowered all over.

And here the poem explains its own hard word, six lines later. 藤條節懞一身花 — the rattan rod, its joints knobbly, flowered over its whole body — is a description of exactly the thing 藤紇䌋 named. A reader who could not place the rare character gets it defined in passing, which is a courtesy the novel does not always extend. 鐏 is the metal butt-spike at the bottom of a shaft, a real piece of equipment and not a poetic flourish.

The great sabre flashed and gleamed broad as a door-leaf; but the monk's magic power outmatched him after all.

如門扇 — like a door-leaf. The novel measures weapons against household objects almost every time: a rod as thick as a rice-bowl, a blade as wide as a door. It keeps a cosmic fight furnished with ordinary things.

On this side, for their master's life, they struck with a will; on that side, rather than give the Tang Monk up, they slashed at their faces.

The longest line in the poem, ten characters a side against the standard seven, and the stretch is doing something. Both halves are about motive rather than movement — why each side will not stop — and the extra characters are what the reason costs. 劈臉 is straight at the face, the most brutal direction a blow can take.

Axes chopped and rods came up to fight it out; rake swung and sabre hacked, the two of them mixed together.

Pure noise, and the line is built to be heard rather than pictured. Four verbs in fourteen characters, alternating weapon and action.

The knotted rattan rod against the demon-quelling staff, over and over, back and forth, they showed their splendid best.

The poem closes on the pairing it opened with, and it spells the rattan a third time — now 扢撻藤條, which is the same word as 藤紇䌋 eight lines earlier, written with two different characters. Both are the everyday word for a lump or a knot, and both begin on the same sound, gē. Chinese had no settled spelling for a word like this: it lived in speech, and writers reached for whatever characters sounded right. This novel spells it four ways across six chapters. The poet uses two of them inside ten lines, which is the sort of thing you can only do when nobody is checking.