View/Open - University of Victoria

151
The traditionally dolorous domain that was the poetic frontier was also a landscape which in
addition to the visually dim and climatically cold gravitated towards the verbally static. 60 Chapter three
of this thesis cited one pre-Tang example of this typical stillness in Chen Shubao's “Song of Rain and
Snow”, a poem whose setting nearly suffocates under a haze of rain and snow spread thickly across the
northern expanse. The opening of Li Shimin's 61 李 世 民 (599-649) “Watering Horses at the Long Wall
Spring” (“Yin ma changcheng ku xing” 饮 马 长 城 窟 行 ) likewise illustrates a landscape of mounting
inertness whose first four lines open with a movement of sharp and sorrowful winds before slowing to
a stationary silence initiated by the act of “freezing” (jie 结 ) which then leads to a total vacancy of
verbs, an absence of action that is filled by an impenetrable concentration of sand and snow:
塞 外 悲 风 切
交 河 冰 已 结
瀚 海 百 重 波
62
阴 山 千 里 雪
Beyond the frontier mournful winds cut,
Jiaohe river ice already frozen.
The Gobi desert, hundreds of layers of undulations;
Yin mountains. 63 thousands of li deep in snow.
Such frontier environments, realms “continuously generated intertextually out of the language of
aridity and coldness of other poems”, 64 often leave the impression that these peripheral spaces only ever
clump into “campaign roads full of dark snow” and “watch towers buried in cold clouds”, 65 a land of
“ancient towns covered in a profusion of frost” 66 that is forever inactive and unmoving. These
assumptions are certainly reasonable until one enters Cen Shen's hibernal landscape.
旌 旗 屡 徂 迁 . 仰 凭 积 雪 岸 , 俯 涉 坚 冰 川 . 冬 来 秋 未 反 , 去 家 邈 以 绵 . YFSJ 38.557.
60 Marsha Wagner, Wang Wei (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981), p. 42.
61 Tang Taizong 唐 太 宗 , second emperor of the Tang dynasty.
62 YFSJ 38.559
63 The Yin mountain range spanning central Inner Mongolia. See Sun Quanmin, ed., Tangdai biansaishi xuanzhu, p. 4.
64 Joseph R. Allen, In the Voice of Others, p. 90.
65 暗 雪 迷 征 路 , 寒 云 隐 戍 楼 . See Chu Guangxi's 储 光 羲 (707-763) “Parting at the Waters of Longtou” (“Longtoushui
songbie” 陇 头 水 送 别 ), QTS 139.1415.
66 繁 霜 覆 古 城 . See Chu Guangxi's “Moon at the Mountain Pass” (“Guanshan yue” 关 山 月 ), QTS 139.1417.