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mockery towards the poet-narrator whose espying of budding green only sharpens his misery within an
unseasonably cold land. Lines one to four of Lu Zhaolin's 卢 照 邻 (636-695) earlier composition
“Song of Falling Snow” 53 (“Yu xue qu” 雨 雪 曲 ) offers greater sensual precision in its production of a
standard frontier whose gloomy snow and sands are made all the more gelid by the lunar limpid ice:
150
54
虏 骑 三 秋 入
At autumn's end nomad horseman come down,
关 云 万 里 平
Clouds over the passes, flat for thousands of miles.
雪 似 胡 沙 暗
The snow seems dark as the Hu sands,
55
冰 如 汉 月 明 The ice as bright as the Chinese moon. 56
(lines 1-4)
Under a similar titular framework and fusing the boreal and desolate to cast an orthodox, though still
quite alluring, frontier setting is Huangfu Ran's 皇 甫 冉 (717-770) “Rain and Snow” (“Yu xue” 雨 雪 ),
a poem whose perceivable elements also whisper the typical angst of isolation and sorrow associated
with serving one's country in its least clement regions: 57
风 沙 悲 久 戍
雨 雪 更 劳 师
绝 漠 无 人 境
将 军 苦 战 时
山 川 迷 向 背
氛 雾 失 旌 旗
徒 念 天 涯 隔
58
中 人 芳 草 期
Wind and sand, a sadness long guarding the borders,
Rain and snow further fatigue the tired troops.
Unending desert, a place devoid of people,
The army general frequently fights bitter battles.
Mountains and rivers disappear all around,
Flags and banners vanish in the cold fog.
Pointless longing separated by the ends of the earth;
For those in central lands it is the season of
fragrant grass. 59
53 See also Chen Shubao's treatment of the same title in chapter three of this thesis.
54 三 秋 (san qiu) refers to the ninth month of the year.
55 QTS 42.523
56 Mildly modified version of Stephen Owen, tr., The Poetry of the Early T'ang, p. 97.
57 Yan Fuling, “ Han-Tang biansaishi zhuti yanjiu”, p. 35.
58 QTS 250.2824.
59 The sense of interminableness and isolation in Huang's poem was felt centuries earlier by Lu Ji's 陆 机 (261-303)
soldiers as they endlessly fended off foreign tribes taunting the country's borders in the following excerpt from the yuefu
topic poem “Watering Horses at the Long Wall Spring” (“Yin ma changcheng ku xing” 饮 马 长 城 窟 行 ): “The war carts
roll ceaselessly along the rutted road,/Banners and pinions move constantly back and forth./Raising their eyes to face the
snow piled peaks,/Lowering them to wade through frozen streams./Arriving in winter, the next fall they are still here,/
Separated from their families by an endless distance”. See Joseph R. Allen, tr., In the Voice of Others, p. 73. 戎 车 无 停 轨 ,