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Conclusion
There is an underlying structure to Cen Shen's hibernal frontier landscapes, one which operates
to intensify the landscape's coldness through a myriad of means. This structure is found across the
poems where the cold landscape is prominent, and can be summarized as shifts in the spatial
coordinates of focalization between exteriority and interiority and distance and nearness; alternations
between focalization of movement and stillness in the frontier landscape; and a typology of “cold”
existents where a cold existent is either innately cold or is cold as a result from the influence of the
landscape's temperature, a non-natural “cold” quality of the existent that is focalized by the poetnarrators
to express the frigidity of the hibernal landscape. As with the first section's discussion of the
“hot” landscape, this section's analysis of Cen Shen's hibernal world rarely strayed into any conjectures
regarding the ideological or emotional significance of the poems' geographies. 102 Instead, the analyses
were motivated by an interest in elucidating a model of the poems' focalization framework, the
apparatus of “seeing” through which the thermal and hibernal landscapes are conveyed to readers. Both
the perceptual and psychological facets of focalization, however, will feature in the following chapter's
examination of an underlying structure of focalization in the frontier landscape of great distances. In
this chapter, discussion will focus on how the manner in which the setting itself is focalized is
expressive of the poet-narrators' feelings in addition to the setting's existents which also act as an
objective correlative 103 for the poet-narrator's feelings of disorientation, separation and homesickness.
102 Such as reading the intense kinetic activity within the landscape of “Ballad of Running Horse River” not for how it is
focalized but for its reflection of the poet-narrator's enthusiasm for war, or reading the heat of “Song of Hot Lake” not
for its manifestation as multiple acts of focalization through different modes and lenses but allegorically as a description
of the frontier signifying the frictional heat of Chinese civilization clashing with frontier barbarian tribes. For such views
on Cen Shen's landscape imagery see Ronald Miao, “T'ang Frontier Poetry”, especially pp. 125, 129.
103 “[A] set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which [are] the formula of [a] particular emotion...such that when the
external facts, which must terminate in sensory perception, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked”. See T.S.
Eliot, “Hamlet”, in Frank Kermode, ed., Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1975), pp.
45-49, especially p. 48.