View/Open - University of Victoria

111
argues that Cen Shen's frontier environment was not entirely restricted to the role of expressive
apparatus for the poet-narrator's own emotional and intellectual responses to frontier service; rather, the
poet-narrator often de-emphasized his presence within the setting and wrote of its fierce, yet
magnificent, natural phenomena out of fondness and curiosity in addition to using such imagery as a
foil for bitter homesickness, personal disappointment and exuberant panegyrics to Tang military
might. 10 “Song of Hot Lake 11 : Sending Off Censor Cui On His Return to the Capital” (“Rehaixing song
Cui Shiyu huanjing” 热 海 行 送 崔 侍 御 还 京 ) typifies the predilection of Cen Shen's poet-narrator for
exploring the landscape without an overriding need to contort its colour, temperature, and inanimate
inhabitants, be they terrestrial or of the hanging celestial kind, into a dramatization of personal feelings:
侧 闻 阴 山 胡 儿 语
西 头 热 海 水 如 煮
海 上 众 鸟 不 敢 飞
中 有 鲤 鱼 长 且 肥
I overheard the Hu people of Yin mountain 12 say
That at the end of the Western frontier lies Hot Lake;
its waters seem to boil.
Flocks of birds don't dare fly overhead,
In the lake carp are long and fat.
岸 旁 青 草 常 不 歇 Green grasses on the shore grow for a long time
and don't wither,
空 中 白 雪 遥 旋 灭 Snow at a distance overhead swirls and then melts.
蒸 沙 烁 石 燃 虏 云 Steaming sands and shining rocks burn the Lu clouds, 13
沸 浪 炎 波 煎 汉 月 Boiling billows and heated waves scorch the Han moon.
“Romanticism” in Cen Shen's frontier poetry despite the frequency of the term in other writings on Cen Shen's frontier
poetry, one example being the opening and second to last paragraph of an essay by Chen Yixin's 陈 贻 焮 where the
appeal of Cen Shen's frontier poetry is ascribed in part to its “spirit of Romanticism” (langmanzhuyi jingshen 浪 漫 主 义
精 神 ) and “Romantic affect” (langman qingdiao 浪 漫 情 调 ). See Chen Yixin 陈 贻 焮 “Tan Censhen de biansaishi 谈 岑
参 的 边 塞 诗 ”in Tangshi luncong 唐 诗 论 丛 (Changsha: Renminchubanshe 人 民 出 版 社 , 1980), pp. 189-196.
10 Yu summarizes the major distinction between Gao Shi and Cen Shen's frontier landscapes as a difference between a
place containing the first-person subject (youwozhijing 有 我 之 境 ) and a place not containing the first-person subject
(wuwozhijing 无 我 之 境 ) with the former situation ascribed to Gao Shi and the latter to Cen Shen, the suggestion being
that Cen Shen's poet-narrator, unlike Gao Shi's, could minimize his emotional imprint on the poem's frontier
environment.
11 “Hot Lake” is Issyk Kul, a lake in eastern Kyrgyzstan. During the Tang, the area was under the jurisdiction of the Anxi
Military Commissioner (Anxi jiedushi 安 西 节 度 使 ).
12 Zhang Hui 张 辉 notes that Yin Mountain (Yinshan 阴 山 ) actually refers to the Tian Mountain (Tianshan 天 山 ) range in
the border region of today's Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and not the Yin
mountain range traversing parts of Inner Mongolia. See Zhang Hui, ed., Cen Shen Biansai shixuan, p. 56).
13 Meaning “frontier clouds”.