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138
(“Mission to Jiaohe”, lines 5-6)
Despite the “scorching” (yan 炎 ) similarity of the winds in these two poems, their focalization by the
poet-narrators is not completely identical. While both poems' winds have the same thermal
characteristic (scorching), the poet-narrator in “Passing Fire Mountain” limits his focalization to this
one feature while adding information about the quantity of the winds and their location, qualifications
which do not enhance the sensuality of the wind. But in “Mission to Jiaohe” these “scorching winds”
are focalized as an animated existent, one that “blows sand and dust” (chui sha'ai 吹 沙 埃 ). Juxtaposed
as such, the “scorching winds” of “Passing Fire Mountain” manifest vaguely and without any
prominent visual clues, a result of the poet-narrator only using the body's skin as a dermal lens to “see”
the thermal quality of the winds and then quantify them as “many” (duo 多 ). In “Mission to Jiaohe”, an
ocular dimension is added to the dermal aspect of the poet-narrator's manner of focalization to form an
ocular-dermal lens. This double manner of focalizing strengthens the perspicuity of the Fire Mountain
winds. With sand and dust ( 沙 埃 ) now blended into the winds through their act of blowing ( 吹 ), the
initial thermal “scorching” (yan 炎 ) quality, a characteristic apprehended by the dermal portion of the
ocular-dermal lens, joins with a visual quality focalized through the ocular angle of the poet-narrator's
ocular-dermal lens to yield a perceptually more intense wind.
Even with the Fire Mountain theme of “Passing Fire Mountain” and “Mission to Jiaohe” broken
down into sub-themes of height and scorching winds, qualities of Fire Mountain focalized by the poetnarrators
through ocular, dermal and ocular-dermal lenses, there still remains another sub-theme to be
focalized by both poet-narrators: the heat itself of Fire Mountain. In order to perceptualize this attribute
of the mountain, the poet-narrators do not merely comment that “it is hot here”; instead, they focalize