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