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gazes westward, feelings of homesickness are more suggestive than direct since home, a major factor in
feelings of nostalgia, is not found in the direction of the gaze, and thus is not available to implant a
yearning of return within the poet-narrator's heart. Since gazing west means facing away from home,
the poet-narrators become even further separated from the familiar and known when they direct their
perception westwards. This feeling of separation as expressed through a westward gaze occurs in the
final two lines of “At Yu Pass: Sent to Assistant Magistrate Li in Chang'an” (“Yu guan ji Chang'an Li
zhubu” 玉 关 寄 长 安 李 主 簿 ), and is intensified by the poet-narrator's response to gazing itself when his
heart breaks (changduan 肠 断 ) after the line's caesura: 49
玉 关 西 望 堪 肠 断
50
况 复 明 朝 是 岁 除
Gazing west from Yu Pass breaks my heart,
Especially with tomorrow morning being the last day of
the year.
(lines 3-4)
In “Presented to Prefect Han of Jiuquan” (“Zeng Jiuquan Han taishou” 赠 酒 泉 韩 太 守 ), the pains of
homesickness are also expressed by a westward gaze, and are enhanced by a description of the endless
mountains, deserts and white grasses of the frontier setting, a setting that manifests its own sense of
remoteness:
酒 泉 西 望 玉 关 道
51
千 山 万 碛 皆 白 草
At Jiuquan gazing west – the road to Yu Pass,
A thousand mountains, ten thousand deserts – all is
white grass.
(lines 5-6)
The precision of east and west is undermined by a third type of spatial coordinates in Cen
Shen's frontier poems of great distances: a spatial coordinate of indeterminacy and extremity. In poems
49
The time of the “gazing west” event, the eve of the new year (suichu 岁 除 ), a time when families should not be
separated but instead gathered together, also intensifies the homesick emotion.
50
CSJJZ, p. 168.
51
CSJJZ, p. 89.