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of focalization); the focalization of alternations in movement between activity and inactivity on the
hibernal setting (degree of kinesis); and the focalization of two types of coldness exhibited by the
existents of the hibernal setting (typology of cold). As in Cen Shen's thermal landscape poems, the
perceptual facet in these hibernal poems is linked intertextually across the poems as a system of
focalization, and it is with attention to these shared manners of focalization that the poems will be read
and discussed.
5.2.2. Scale of Focalization: Ambient Spatial Coordinates
A major source of symmetry among Cen Shen's poet-narrators in their focalization of the
hibernal landscape resides in the shifting spatial coordinates of their perceptual facets. These spatial
instabilities can be described as “ambient” on the scale of focalization, a position indicative of a certain
amount of fluidity and flexibility. As it pertains to the following poems, these coordinates can be
characterized specifically as overlapping sets of exteriority and interiority, and distance and nearness,
binaries which reflect the spatial inconstancy guiding the poet-narrator's “roving eye” across Cen
Shen's hibernal landscapes. 77
The exterior-interior spatial dichotomy is most easily recognized in the poems as a shift
between scenes of cold focalized outdoors on the hibernal frontier, by far the most frequent coordinate,
and scenes within army tents, interior moments which actually function to emphasize the strength of
the cold by contrasting tiny human habitations and gatherings with the all pervasive, dominating freeze
77 The “roving eye” is a term used by Yi-yu Cho Woo to describe the shifting viewpoint in Wang Wei's “Zhongnan
Mountain” (“Zhongnan shan” 终 南 山 ), a poem in which perspective also shifts with great frequency; in the first four
lines alone there are alterations from level ground, to the mountain at a distance, to exiting the mountain and then
looking down from it. See Yi-yu Cho Woo, “Chinese Poetry and Painting: Some Observations on Their
Interrelationship” Monumenta Serica, Vol. 34 (1979-1980), pp. 403-413, especially p. 412. Although the subject is
neither Cen Shen nor focalization, an enjoyable analysis of modulations in perceptual coordiates can still be found in
Thomas Yuntong Luk's “A Cinematic Interpretation of Wang Wei's Nature Poetry” in William Tay, Ying-hsiung Chou
and Heh-hsiang Yuan, ed., China and the West: Comparative Literature Studies (Hong Kong: China University Press,
1980), pp. 151-161. Wai-lim Yip also touches on the topic in the introduction to his translations of Wang Wei's poetry in
Hiding the Universe: Poems by Wang Wei (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973).