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164<br />
瀚 海 阑 干 百 丈 冰<br />
愁 云 惨 淡 万 里 凝<br />
Vast desert, railings <strong>of</strong> ice criss-cross a hundred meters<br />
thick ,<br />
Sorrow clouds and gloom condense over ten thousand<br />
li.<br />
(“Song <strong>of</strong> White Snow”, lines 9-10)<br />
This intertextual intersection meets at an image <strong>of</strong> motionless in the very thickness <strong>of</strong> the ice, a<br />
thousand meters in “Song <strong>of</strong> Snow on Tian Mountain” and one hundred meters in “Song <strong>of</strong> White<br />
Snow”, 86 and the clouds' static states initiated by the verb 凝 (ning), meaning here “to freeze; to<br />
condense”.<br />
Patterns <strong>of</strong> landscape motion and stillness in “Song <strong>of</strong> Snow on Tian Mountain” alternate with a<br />
greater rate <strong>of</strong> frequency than they do in “Song <strong>of</strong> White Snow”. 87 But focalization in “Ballad <strong>of</strong><br />
Running Horse River”, the other frontier poem <strong>of</strong> Cen Shen's where the hibernal lands <strong>of</strong> China's<br />
northwest are prominently featured, tears apart the stillness-motion binary and exclusively follows a<br />
wave <strong>of</strong> incessant motion across the snowy drifts. Aside from the inert calm <strong>of</strong> the second line's distant<br />
perspective <strong>of</strong> yellow desert sands entering unbroken into the sky, 88 frenzied forces <strong>of</strong> movement, and<br />
not shifts between activity and inactivity, dictate the quality <strong>of</strong> the landscape's kinesis. Geographic<br />
names themselves, such as the unrelenting push <strong>of</strong> “running” (zou 走 ) and “river” (chuan 川 ) <strong>of</strong><br />
Running Horse River and the billowing <strong>of</strong> snow in sea <strong>of</strong> snow (xuehai 雪 海 ), urge the landscape's<br />
movement forward as do the haphazard, chaotic movements <strong>of</strong> wind and stones along the cold, parched<br />
ground. This high degree <strong>of</strong> kinesis embodied in the poem's landscape effectively erases conventional<br />
86 One 丈 (zhang) is actually 3.3 meters.<br />
87 There is only one kinetic shift, that <strong>of</strong> motion to stillness, in the core landscape scenes <strong>of</strong> “Song <strong>of</strong> White Snow”: lines<br />
one to four (motion) and nine to ten (stillness). But in “Song <strong>of</strong> Snow on Tian Mountain”, there are a greater number <strong>of</strong><br />
exchanges: stillness (lines one to two) to motion (lines three to four) to stillness (line five) to motion (line six) and then a<br />
return to stillness (lines nine to ten).<br />
88 “Level sands vast and wide all yellow entering the sky” 平 沙 莽 莽 黄 入 天 . The verb 入 (ru, enter) connotes a spatial<br />
continuity <strong>of</strong> a setting's existents stretching uninterrupted into the distance. See Stephen Owen, The Poetry <strong>of</strong> the Early<br />
T'ang, pp. 162 and 283.