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Mountain's combustive fury seems gentle in its violent aspirations. Penetrating past snow and clouds,
Hot Lake's “boiling billows and scorching waves” (feilang yanbo 沸 浪 炎 波 ) stretch far enough to
“boil” (jian 煎 ) the Han moon (han yue 汉 月 ), an extraterrestrial object which because of its “han” 汉
designation has a correlation with the poet-narrators distant home in China proper. 46 The sub-thematic
steam of Hot Lake also joins the offensive and “swallows moon caves” (tun yueku 吞 月 窟 ) while
“attacking Venus” (qin taibai 侵 太 白 ) before rushing through (tong 通 ) the more local “Xiongnu lands”
(chanyu 单 于 ) to declare the landscape's thermal might.
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Conclusion
An advantage of orienting an analysis of Cen Shen's thermal landscape poems towards their
focalization is that it draws an awareness towards how the existents of the landscape are focalized by
the poet-narrators in addition to the type of imagery constituting the thermal landscape itself within the
different poems. In so doing, the complexity of the poet-narrators' manners of focalization in ordinary
and imaginary modes is foregrounded to reveal an underlying interrelationship in the manner by which
the fiery landscape is presented in Cen Shen's frontier poems. The conclusion generated by such an
analysis is that the poet-narrators' acts of focalization are multitudinous in nature and repeated across
the texts. “Seeing” the complete thermal landscape demands that the poet-narrators not only focalize
through their eyes, skin and sweat glands to apprehend that which is in ordinary sensory range but that
they also “see” the landscape through allusion in order to convey to readers the extra-sensory subthematic
heat emitted by its two thermal themes, Fire Mountain and Hot Lake. Despite the burning
chaos unleashed by Cen Shen's thermal landscapes, scenes so “forceful and original” 47 that they
46 Stephen Owen, The Poetry of the Early T'ang, p. 350.
47 Marie Chan, Cen Shen, p. 93.