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胡 天 八 月 即 飞 雪
忽 如 一 夜 春 风 来
千 树 万 树 梨 花 开
In the eighth month snow already flies throughout the
Hu sky.
Suddenly as if in the night the Spring wind arrives,
On tens of thousands of trees pear flowers bloom.
(“Song of White Snow”, lines 1-4)
While intertextually echoing the verb of the third line in “Song of Snow on Tian Mountain” (“the
night's north wind rolls over Chiting Pass”), the poet-narrator here opens by focalizing the activeness of
the ground that is “rolled up” ( 卷 ) by the north wind while white grasses “snap” ( 折 ) under the tumult
of wintry gales. The fierceness of the meteorological onslaught is somewhat mitigated in the following
three lines where aside from a reduction in the number of verbs, now one per line (“flying” snow (fei
xue 飞 雪 ); spring wind “arrives” (chunfeng lai 春 风 来 ); and pear flowers “bloom” (lihua kai 梨 花 开 )),
the movements of the landscape become gentler if also mildly disturbing in their unexpectedness. 85
After having narrowed their focus on the horse hooves in “Song of Snow on Tian Mountain”
and the general's armour in “Song of White Snow”, the spatial coordinates of the poet-narrators'
focalization pan back to focalize the frontier at a distance. At this moment landscape stillness returns to
dominate the active-still dichotomy, doing so through the focalization of the cold desert's immobile
“railings of ice” and “gloom filled clouds” in both “Song of Snow on Tian Mountain” and “Song of
White Snow”:
晻 霭 寒 氛 万 里 凝
阑 干 阴 崖 千 丈 冰
Gloom cold clouds freeze everything over a distance of
ten thousand li,
Railings upon shaded cliffs are a thousand meters of ice.
(“Song of Snow on Tian Mountain”, lines 9-10)
85 The second line's 即 (ji), meaning “immediately; right then” (See Stephen Owen, Great Age of Chinese Poetry, p. 377),
and the 忽 (hu) of 忽 如 (huru, suddenly as if) in line three, meaning “suddenly”, project a sense of great speed and
transition that complements the change from an online (ordinary) focalization of winter to an offline (imagined)
description of spring.