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In short, the intention behind this section of chapter five is to reinvigorate an appreciation of
Cen Shen's thermal landscape through a reading which shows relations between the texts in the very
manner by which their poet-narrators focalize the frontier setting of intense heat. By inter-reading 16 Cen
Shen's thermal landscape poems with attention to certain qualities of their focalization, one is able to
witness the emergence of an affiliated pattern of focalization which draws the texts together into an
intertextual relationship substantiated not merely by iterated imagery but also their shared methods of
focalization.
5.1.1. Coordinated Openings
The heat of Cen Shen's fiery landscapes is predicated on a central geographic source, a thermal
theme that is the opening baseline for sub-thematic amplifications of the sweltering frontier. In
“Passing Fire Mountain”, “Song of Fire Mountain Clouds” and “Mission to Jiaohe”, this thermal theme
is Fire Mountain (huoshan 火 山 ); in “Song of Hot Lake”, it is the titular Hot Lake (rehai 热 海 ):
火 山 今 始 见
突 兀 蒲 昌 东
Fire Mountain, 17 today seen for the first time
Towers east of Puchang.
(“Passing Fire Mountain”, lines 1-2)
火 山 突 兀 赤 亭 口
火 山 五 月 火 云 厚
Fire Mountain towers over the entrance to Chiting,
Fire Mountain in the fifth month, fire clouds are thick.
(“Song of Fire Mountain Clouds”, lines 1-2)
in Jahn's terms the “W” field encompassing the “V” and “F2” fields focused by the focalizer (F1). The world in these
poems is the frontier itself; the “V” are themes of the focalized existing within the frontier; and the F2 are sub-themes,
specific features of the themes that are focused on by the poet-narrator. See Jahn's diagram at the conclusion of the
previous chapter.
16 “Poems are not things but only words that refer to other words, and those words refer still to other words, and so
on...Any poem is an inter-poem, and any reading of a poem is an inter-reading”. See Harold Bloom, Poetry and
Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 3. What this section is
doing is actually substituting “words” with “focalizations” to argue that Cen Shen's thermal landscapes echo each other
through the means by which they are focalized by the poet-narrators.
17 火 山 (huoshan) is not translated here as “volcano” because the “fire” ( 火 ) of the mountain refers to its colour and the
temperature of the region, and not to any penchant for lava spewing.