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