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177
连 年 闻 鼓 鼙
故 山 在 何 处
33
昨 日 梦 清 溪
Year after year hear battle drums.
Where is my dear old mountain,
Last night I dreamt of its clear streams.
(“Setting Off Early from Yanqi and Thinking of My Villa at Zhongnan Mountain”,
lines 5-8)
新 诗 吟 未 足
34
昨 夜 梦 东 还
Chanting new poems does not bring satisfaction,
Last night I dreamt of returning east.
(“Respectfully Presented in Response to Administrative Assistant Li's 'Impromptu at
the Government Office”, lines 7-8)
“In the course of a life filled with much travel, Cen Shen had many occasions to express his
longing for his home”. 35 The use of letters and dreams, as demonstrated above, is one method for
presenting such feelings in poetry. Another technique for manifesting these yearnings is in the very
manner by which the poet-narrator focalizes the vast distances of the frontier landscape, meaning that
aside from the poems' landscape settings themselves being an objective correlative of the poetnarrators'
homesick emotions, 36 the way these landscapes are focalized by a poem's poet-narrator also
expresses feelings of nostalgia for home. Thus, aside from a setting's existents – the desert sands, the
sky or music, for example – embodying homesickness and feelings of separation, how the existents are
focalized also reveals the emotional state of the poet-narrator.
33
“Zao fa Yanqi huai Zhongnan bieye” 早 发 焉 耆 怀 终 难 别 业 . See CSJJZ, p. 85.
34
“Jing chou Li panguan shiyuan jishi jiancheng” 敬 酬 李 判 官 使 院 即 事 见 呈 . See CSJJZ, p. 162.
35
Marie Chan, Cen Shen, p. 36. See chapter one of this thesis for details regarding Cen Shen's frontier ventures. For an
overview of Cen Shen's frontier and non-frontier travels see Marie Chen, Cen Shen, pp. 1-18. See also Stephen Owen,
The Great Age of Chinese Poetry, pp. 171-181 for a general background to the poet's life.
36
The setting can also be understood as symbolic. See Robert Liddell's five types of settings: the utilitarian, symbolic,
irrelevant, countries of the mind, and kaleidoscopic. Unlike the utilitarian setting, one which is minimally necessary for
action, or the irrelevant setting, a setting bereft of all significance, a symbolic setting is a type of setting which stresses a
tight relationship between the actions of its existents, such as the poet-narrator who occupies the setting, and the way the
landscape itself is presented. For purposes here, the action is the poet-narrator's feelings and expression of
homesickness, an act which affects the presentation of the landscape and makes its perception akin to the feelings of
homesickness experienced by the poet-narrator himself. Liddell's other two types of settings, countries of the mind and
kaleidoscopic, are concerned with the inner landscape of reminiscence and shifts in perspective between the outside
physical world and the world of the imagination. See Robert Liddell, A Treatise of the Novel (London: Cape, 1947), pp.
113-128 and Seymour Chapman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1978), p. 143.