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轮 台 东 门 送 君 去
去 时 雪 满 天 山 路
山 回 路 转 不 见 君
雪 上 空 留 马 行 处
Seeing you off at the east gate of Luntai,
At your departure snow fills the road of Tian Mountain.
The mountain curves, the road turns, I can not see you:
In the snow empty hoof prints are left behind.
(“Song of White Snow”, lines 13-16)
Corresponding spatial shifts from exterior to interior coordinates are minimal in “Song of Snow
on Tian Mountain” and “Ballad of Running Horse River”. The single focalizational pivot from
exteriority to interiority in “Song of Snow on Tian Mountain” does have a similar effect as that of the
first outside-inside movement in “Song of White Snow”: by breaching spatial boundaries and
broadening the depth of its penetration into “the general's fox skins” (jiangjun huqiu wo 将 军 狐 裘 ), the
strength and range of the frontier cold, now truly omnipresent, intensifies in its potency. But the
interiorization of cold in “Ballad of Running Horse River” is different. Rather than using a spatial shift
to expand the dominion of the frontier's deadly temperature, the poet-narrator's focalization of the
“frozen” aspect of “inkstone water used for writing documents denouncing the enemy” (caoxi yanshui
bing 草 檄 砚 水 冰 ) inside the “army tent” (mu zhong 幕 中 ) functions as a metaphor for the fearless
resolve and tenacity of general Feng Changqing and the soldiers under his command. In fact, the failure
of the poem's inclement environment to weaken the army's martial resolve is suggested throughout the
poem in how the setting's cold existents reflect rather than enervate an attitude of unflagging boldness
on the frontier.
A less frequent pattern of spatial coordinate shifts found among all three poems is focalization
that alternates between distance and nearness. This paucity of symmetry is due to “Ballad of Running
Horse River”; of its seventeen lines, it is only in the opening two lines of the poem and the second line
of the second tercet (“West of Jin Mountain one sees smoke and flying dust”) that the poet-narrator
focalizes existents of the hibernal landscape from afar. The first instance of distant spatial coordinates
establishes the general terrain, a procedure previously noted in Cen Shen's thermal poems where a