View/Open - University of Victoria

178
Specifically, two characteristics of the poet-narrators' focalization of the frontier landscape will
be discussed in order to show how homesickness is revealed through the poet-narrators' manners of
perception. The first of these aspects is the spatial coordinates of the poet-narrators' perceptual facet, in
particular eastward, westward and non-directional gazes, and how by examining the spatial coordinates
of focalization themselves expressions of homesickness and feelings of separation can be identified.
The second characteristic to be investigated is how the poet-narrators, while heavily influenced by a
desire to return home, focus their perception 37 on three existents of the frontier setting – a river, a
commissioner, and a parrot – and rely on them, as mobile, frontier-exiting existents, to bridge, if
unsuccessfully, the lonely gulf between the northwestern frontier and poet-narrator's home in the east.
The goal of such an analysis is to show that the act of focalization in and of itself resonates with a
desire on the part of Cen Shen's poet-narrators to retrace their westward steps of departure and return
eastwards to familiar and comfortable locales, and that Hu music, letters to and from home, and
nostalgia fuelled dreams are not the sole instruments of expressing homesickness on the frontier.
6.1.1. Spatial Coordinates as Expressions of Homesickness and Separation
Feelings of homesickness as revealed through the act of perceiving a seemingly boundless
fissure between a poet-narrator's current geographical position and his distant home is not restricted to
Cen Shen's frontier poetry. For example, a correlation between gazing into a far off distance, literally
“one thousand li” (qian li 千 里 ) in this case, and the sting of separation is made by the poet-narrator in
lines nine to fourteen from Wei Zheng's 魏 徵 (580-643) “Expressing My Feelings” (“Shu huai” 述 怀 ),
a poem in which perception alone wounds the poet-narrator's heart:
郁 纡 陟 高 岫
Strode over high mountains on torturous paths,
出 没 望 平 原
Gazed on the plain, coming into view, disappearing.
古 木 鸣 寒 鸟
In ancient trees the birds of winter sing,
37
That is, focalize specific features of the three existents when perceiving them.