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