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179
空 山 啼 夜 猿
既 伤 千 里 目
38
还 惊 九 逝 魂
On deserted mountains the gibbons cry by night.
The eye gazes far, the heart is wounded;
The dreaming soul flies home, startles awake again
and again. 39
(lines 9-14)
In the first half of Du Shenyan's 杜 审 言 (645-708) exile poem 40 “Longing to Return on a Spring Day”
(“Chun ri huai gui” 春 日 怀 归 ), the poet-narrator's act of orientating perception towards a homeward
coordinate elicits a negative emotional response, a reaction that is exacerbated by how the exile
setting's existents – its reflected mountains and vegetation – only remind the poet-narrator of that
which is absent and far away:
心 是 伤 归 望
The heart is wounded by my homeward gaze,
春 归 异 往 年
Spring's arrival is different from years past.
河 山 鉴 魏 阙
Mountains in rivers seem to mirror the gate of Wei,
41
桑 梓 忆 秦 川 The mulberries, the catalpa remind me of Qin's streams. 42
(lines 1-4)
By having become transformed from an act of perception into an immobile object (the Great Wall
(changcheng 长 城 ) emanating the sorrow of separation, the homeward gaze in this opening excerpt
from Wang Jian's “Watering Horses at the Great Wall Spring” (“Yin ma Changchen ku xing” 饮 马 长 城
窟 行 ) becomes an even more concentrated signifier of homesickness, one in which the act of gazing
towards home has become part of a cold, hard immobile wall:
38
QTS 31.441.
39
See Stephen Owen, tr., The Poetry of the Early T'ang, p. 28.
40
Du Shenyan was twice sent into exile, the second time in 705 to the far south of China. See Stephen Owen, The Poetry
of the Early T'ang, pp. 325-326. Exile poetry was a sub-genre of verse whose audience in the capital “would expect the
poet to write on subjects avoided in the capital: the poet's moral values, his doubts, the intensity of his suffering, his
hatred of public service...Exiles and non-exiles alike turned to the tradition of exile poetry to express their private
intensities...”. See Stephen Owen, The Great Age of Chinese Poetry, p. 6.
41
QTS 62.734.
42
See Stephen Owen, tr., The Poetry of the Early T'ang, p. 337.