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obliterate the impact of the putative farewells conventionally attached to the end of “Song of Fire
Mountain Clouds” and “Song of Hot Lake”, a feeling of calm amidst the environmental entropy can be
found through an intertextual understanding of how their poet-narrators harmonize their acts of
focalization to present these “new realms” 48 of the frontier landscape.
5.2 Cen Shen's Hibernal Landscape: A System of Snow and Cold
Cen Shen's frontier thermal landscapes are somewhat anomalous, an alien glow within a subgenre
of poetry whose dominate natural setting prefers the dreary and wintry to the sweat-drenched and
hot. Chapter two of this thesis briefly elaborated on how Tang and pre-Tang poets were predisposed
towards the bleak and brumal in their depictions of China's northern borderlands, using the geography's
dismalness as a delivery system of both experienced and imagined hardship and sorrow: 49
二 月 犹 北 风
天 阴 雪 冥 冥
寥 落 一 室 中
怅 然 惭 百 龄
苦 愁 正 如 此
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门 柳 复 青 青
The second month and there is still a northern wind,
An overcast sky, snow dark and gloomy.
Within a small, cold desolate room,
Deeply disconsolate that I've frittered away my life.
Bitter sorrow is just like this,
The willow 51 by the gate is green again.
This first of four poems forming the set “Suffering from the Snow” (“Ku xue si shou” 苦 雪 四 首 ) is
Gao Shi's minimally descriptive 52 yet devastatingly unsubtle and melancholic response to such a
northern frontier; the scene itself is prototypical for its prevalent darkness, marrow-burrowing chill and
48 Marie Chan, “The Frontier Poems of Ts'en Shen”, p. 428.
49 The fact that the climate of northern China's borders was, and still is, cold also had a strong, and obvious, influence on
its depictions in frontier poetry in addition to the landscape functioning as a correlative of the poet-narrator's'
psychological state. SeeYan Fuling, “ Han-Tang biansaishi zhuti yanjiu”, pp, 25-26.
50 GSJJZ, p. 18.
51 The willow itself, whether seen or imagined by the poet-narrator as having grown in his hometown, is often used to
signify homesickness through the homophony of 柳 (liu, willow) and 留 (liu, to stay). The poet-narrator here might be
saying this reminder of home, the willow, is assaulted on all sides the coldness of the region, an action which makes his
homesickness all the more painful (Dr. Tsung-Cheng Lin, personal correspondence, May 2013).
52 Appropriate when considering that “Gao Shi [was] more a poet of mood rather than descriptive imagination”. See
Stephen Owen, Great Age of Chinese Poetry, p. 151.