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associations of desolation and uses the turbulent motion of howling winds, tumbling rocks, flying dust
and face slashing winds to echo the violence of combat 89 only indirectly suggested by the armour and
weapons in “Song of White Snow” and “Song of Snow on Tian Mountain”.
165
5.2.4. A Typology of Cold: Innateness and Effect
In addition to the ambient spatial coordinates of the poet-narrators' focalization and the
focalization of the landscape as patterns of stillness and motion, there is a third intertextual
commonality linking the texts' presentation of the hibernal landscape: the types of cold existents of the
setting itself. This typology of cold is comprised of two categories of frigid phenomenon: existents
which are innately cold, and existents whose “coldness” is not innate and but is instead the effect of the
hibernal landscape on the existents themselves. 90 As with spatial coordinates and degree of kinesis, the
typology of cold existents is another intertextual feature of Cen Shen's hibernal landscape, one which
here shifts between binary nodes of innateness and effect.
The variety of innately cold existents within the hibernal setting is rather limited. Among those
existents which evince the conventional temperature of the Tang frontier in Cen Shen's poems, snow is
certainly the most common. In the opening of all three poems featuring extended descriptions of the
hibernal landscape, it is snow which establishes the scene. However, there are frontier poems by Cen
Shen in which the setting is actually a minor feature, meaning that none of the possible features of the
snow is focalized. At its least modified, that is where snow is just background snow, there is the first
four lines of “Sent to Administrative Assistant Yuwen” (“Ji Yuwen panguan” 寄 宇 文 判 官 ):
89 Marie Chan, Cen Shen, p. 98; “The Frontier Poems of Ts'en Shen”, p. 430. See also Ronald Miao, “T'ang Frontier
Poetry”, p. 124.
90 An innately cold object is an ice-cube or a snowball. An object which is cold but whose coldness is not innate could be a
pair of frozen mittens found on a school field after a snowball fight. Since their cold quality is an effect of the frost and
snow which covers them, and not a characteristic of the yarn from which they were crocheted, these mittens cannot be
regarded as innately cold even when they are in fact cold.