View/Open - University of Victoria

153
towards the indefatigable and sonorous martial spirit drowning out the sad and piteous tones often
heard in such poetry 70 , a heroic temperament easily discovered intertwined with the following
“energetic” 71 and highly kinetic images in lines seven to ten of “Song of Lutai: Presented When
Sending Off General Feng Leading His Troops on a Western Campaign” (“Luntai ge feng song Feng
dafu chushi xizheng” 轮 台 歌 奉 送 封 大 夫 出 师 西 征 ):
上 将 拥 旄 西 出 征
平 明 吹 笛 大 军 行
四 边 伐 鼓 雪 海 涌
73
三 军 大 呼 阴 山 动
Yak tail adorned pennants 72 surround the general on his
western campaign march,
At sunrise pipes sound and the great army sets out.
On all sides drums pound, the sea of snow roils;
The entire army shouts, Yin mountain 74 shakes.
The aforementioned opinions on the imagery and emotion of Cen Shen's winter landscapes are
certainly not inaccurate; the only deficiencies for purposes here are in the limitations of their scope. But
rather than find fault with the restricted range of these commentaries, the remainder of this chapter will
instead contribute to the discussion of Cen Shen's places of quiver inducing cold by considering
patterns in the perceptual facet of the poet-narrators' acts of focalization, 75 and how their manners of
focalization intertexutally link Cen Shen's major hibernal landscape poems. 76 These manners include
shifts in the spatial coordinates of the poet-narrators' focalization of the poems' “cold” landscape (scale
70 Yan Fuling, “ Han-Tang biansaishi zhuti yanjiu”, p. 39.
71 Marie Chan, “The Frontier Poems of Ts'en Shen”, p. 432.
72 Pennants that accompanied a military officer on campaign or on the battlefield. See note in CSJJZ, p. 147.
73 CSJJZ, p. 146.
74 Here a reference to Tian mountain and not the Yin mountain of Inner Mongolia. See Zhang Hui, ed., Cen Shen
biansaishixuan, p. 56.
75 The psychological facet of Cen Shen's hibernal landscapes will not be elaborated upon here. Chapter six, however, will
be investigating the interaction of the perceptual and psychological facets in the focalization of landscapes characterized
by great distances and homesickness.
76 “Hibernal landscape poems” meaning those poems where the setting of the cold, snow laden frontier features
predominantly, namely “The Ballad of Running Horse River: Presented Upon Escorting My Lord Feng With His Troops on
a Western Campaign” (“Zoumachuan xing feng song chushi xizhang” 走 马 川 行 奉 送 出 师 西 征 ), “Song of Snow on Tian
Mountain: Sending Off Xiao Zhi on His Return to the Capital” (“Tianshanxue ge song Xiao Zhi gui jing” 天 山 雪 歌 送 萧 治
归 京 ), and “Song of White Snow: Sending Off Administrative Officer Wu on His Return to the Capital” (“Baixue ge song
Wu panguan gui jing” 白 雪 歌 送 武 判 官 归 京 ). Although putatively “sending off” poems, Cen Shen in these instances, as
noted earlier, “describes...the scene with vigour [and] then ties it in the most tenuous way to the occasion”, foregrounding
the landscape and not the circumstances of parting. See Stephen Owen, Great Age of Chinese Poetry, p. 177. See the second
appendix of this thesis for their full translation.