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This subsuming of the frontier environment into the poet-narrator's expression of his own anxiousness
occurs in lines one to six of Gao Shi's “Written at Ji” (“Jizhong zuo” 蓟 中 作 ):
策 马 自 沙 漠 I whipped on my horse out of the desert,
长 驱 登 塞 垣 Galloped afar to climb the barrier walls:
边 城 何 萧 条 So somber and grim, these border ramparts, 5
白 日 黄 云 昏 Where the bright sun darkened in clouds of brown.
一 到 征 战 处 Each time I come to some site of battle,
6
每 愁 胡 虏 翻 I worry that the nomads may return. 7
The prototypical “somber and grim” frontier landscape with its “darkened...white sun” and “clouds of
brown” manifests the “grief” of the poet-narrator towards the territory's political instability, and as such
manifests a habit in Tang poetry in which “the general tendency was to merge themes of the natural
world with those of personal states of mind...often described as a 'fusion of feeling and scene' (qing jing
jiao rong 情 景 交 融 )”. 8 In this instance, the northern frontier is the amalgam of a generic atmosphere
and the poet-narrator's feelings of doom, a worried mind embodied in an emotionally affected
geography.
Cen Shen, on the other hand, not only had a tendency to foreground the natural setting of the
frontier but did so in an especially detailed, imaginative and exaggerated manner. 9 Furthermore, Yu
presented..tend[ed] to be very much generalized”. See William Tay, “The Substantive Level Revisited: Concreteness and
Nature Imagery in T'ang Poetry” in William Tay, Ying-hsiung Chou and Heh-hsiang Yuan ed., China and the West:
Comparative Literature Studies (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1980), pp. 127-149, especially pp. 132-133.
Nonetheless, when juxtaposed against the perceptual particularity of Cen Shen's poet-narrator, Gao Shi's frontier
landscapes do often sink into the standard and fairly unremarkable.
5 “Somber and grim” (xiao tiao 萧 条 ) refers to a desolation evocative of a mood of gloom. See Stephen Owen, The Great
Age of Chinese Poetry, p. 373.
6 GSJJZ, p. 188
7 Stephen Owen, tr., Great Age of Chinese Poetry, p. 150-151.
8 Charles Egan “Recent-Style Shi Poetry: Quatrains (Jueju)” in Zong-Qi Cai ed., How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided
Anthology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 199-225, especially p. 199. James Liu categorizes this
understanding of poetry as the “Intuitionalist View”, one in which “the essence of poetry lies in its embodiment of the
external world as reflected through the poet's mind, as well as its revelation of the internal world of feeling”. See James
Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 86-87. For an extended study on the
subject, see Cecile Chu-chin Sun, Pearl from the Dragon's Mouth: Evocation of Scene and Feeling in Chinese Poetry
(Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, The University of Michigan, 1995).
9 Yu Zhengsong, “Gaoshi yu Cen Shen shifeng zhi yitong”p. 236. Yu further qualifies Cen Shen's frontier landscape as
posssessing an air of “ 浪 漫 主 义 ”(langmanzhuyi), a term I would tentatively translate as “Romanticism” though in
which context and tradition is impossible to know since Yu omits any explanation of its usage. The problem that ensues
through such explanatory omission poses enough of a risk to force this thesis away from any overview of
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