View/Open - University of Victoria

171
Part Two : Focalization in Cen Shen's Frontier Landscapes
Chapter Six: Perceiving the Landscape of Distance
6.1. The Frontier and Homesickness 1
The pangs and perturbations of frontier homesickness have a long history of poetic wails and
whimpers, a history which began stinging hearts in the campaign-themed poems of Shijing 诗 经 (The
Book of Songs). 2 Developing first from the angst of familial separation, the cleaving of matrimonial
bonds expressed through the sorrow of fractured couples became a tenacious and frequent emotive
feature of frontier poetry from Han to Tang times. 3 Chen Lin's 陈 琳 (d. 217) “Watering Horses at the
Great Wall Spring” (“Yin ma changcheng ku xing” 饮 马 长 城 窟 行 ) makes this correlation rather
directly:
长 城 何 连 连
How the Great Wall goes on and on,
连 连 三 千 里
On and on for three thousand li.
边 城 多 健 少
Many young men are in the border towns,
4
内 舍 多 寡 妇 Many abandoned women in their homes. 5
(lines 9-12)
as does the anticipatory, if imaginary, scene concluding the first of Xiao Gang's 6 “In the Army”
1
See chapters two and three of this thesis for comments on homesickness in frontier poetry. The following few pages here
function as a brief return to the topic before embarking on a discussion of how the poet-narrator in Cen Shen's frontier
verse perceptualizes the landscape as a materialization of nostalgic feelings for home.
2
Such as “Gathering Ferns” (“Cai wei” 采 蔚 ), “Sending Out the Chariots” (“Chu ju” 出 车 ), excerpted in chapter two of
this thesis, and “Climb the Wooded Hill” (“Zhi hu” 陟 岵 ), the first third of which is translated here: “I climb the wooded
hill,/And look toward where my father is./My father is saying, 'Alas my son is in service;/Day and night he knows no
rest./Grant that he is being careful of himself,/So that he may come back and not be left behind!”. Slightly modified
version of Arthur Waley, tr., The Book of Songs, p. 115. 陟 彼 岵 兮 , 瞻 望 父 兮 . 父 曰 : ' 嗟 ! 予 子 行 役 , 夙 夜 无 已 . 上 慎 旃
哉 ! 犹 来 , 无 止 . See Shijing, p. 56. See also Yan Fuling 阎 福 玲 , “Biansaishi xianglian zhuti de shidai tedian yu jiazhi 边
塞 诗 乡 恋 主 题 的 时 代 特 点 与 价 值 ”Jinyangxuekan 晋 阳 学 刊 5 (1999): 74-78, especially p. 74 and Joseph Allen, In
the Voice of Others, p. 81.
3
Yan Fuling, “Biansaishi xianglian”, p. 75.
4
YFSJ 38.556.
5
Slightly modified version of Joseph Allen, tr., In the Voice of Others, p. 71.
6
See biographical note in chapter three of this thesis.