View/Open - University of Victoria

180
长 城 窟
长 城 窟 边 多 马 骨
古 来 此 地 无 井 泉
赖 得 秦 家 筑 城 卒
征 人 饮 马 愁 不 回
43
长 城 变 作 望 乡 堆
The Great Wall spring,
At the Great Wall spring there are many horse bones.
In ancient times this place had no well or spring,
It came into being when Qin troops built the wall.
Campaign soldiers water their horses, sad they can't return,
The Great Wall has transformed to become a pile of
homeward gazes.
(lines 1-6)
The gaze itself of the poet-narrator also expresses emotion in Cen Shen's frontier verse; more
precisely, it is the spatial coordinates of focalization themselves which can be read as expressing either
a longing for home or a sense of separation, and at times confusion, across immense peripheral
distances. These spatial coordinates include a gaze eastwards, a gaze westwards, and a gaze which does
not adhere to one specific cardinal point. The first type, an eastward gaze, is the perceptual spatial
coordinate most closely aligned with expressions of homesickness. An early example 44 of this oriented
gaze in Cen Shen's frontier poetry is found in the first two lines of “Encountering a Commissioner on
His Way to the Capital” (“Feng ru jing shi” 逢 入 京 使 ):
故 园 东 望 路 漫 漫
45
双 袖 龙 钟 泪 不 干
Gazing east towards home, the road goes on and on,
Both sleeves soaked with tears that do not dry.
(lines 1-2)
The poet-narrator directs his perception east in the direction of home without actually perceiving home
itself; instead he is only able to directly apprehend the road which “goes on and on” (lu manman 路 漫
漫 ) in the direction of home. While feelings of homesickness can be extracted from the two existents of
the line, home (guyuan 故 园 ) and the long, boundless road ( 路 漫 漫 ), the easterly orientation of the
43
YFSJ 38.561.
44
The CSJJZ notes that the poem was composed during Cen Shen's first frontier excursion while en route from the capital,
Chang'an, to the western regions. See CSJJZ, p. 77.
45
CSJJZ, p. 77.