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One way of responding to the aches of homesickness and pains of separation caused by such vastness is
for the poet-narrator of Cen Shen's poems to utilize existents of the setting to link himself, if rather
tenuously, with his home east of the borderlands. In Cen Shen's frontier poetry, these efforts on the part
of the poet-narrator to alleviate feelings of homesickness involve the Wei river 59 (weishui 渭 水 ), a
commissioner (shi 使 ) heading back to the capital, 60 and a parrot, 61 a trio of existents that when
focalized through a psychological facet overwhelmed by a longing to return home become vehicles for
soothing the poet-narrator's nostalgic desire to connect with places he left in order to serve on China's
northwestern border regions.
The first frontier setting existent which the poet-narrator employs to connect himself with home
is the eastward flowing Wei river in “Passing West Through Weizhou: Seeing the Wei River I Think of
the Qin Waters”:
渭 水 东 流 去
何 时 到 雍 州
凭 添 两 行 泪
62
寄 向 故 园 流
The waters of the Wei river flow east,
When will they reach Yongzhou?
I add to the waters two streams of tears,
And send them flowing towards my home.
Before discussing how the poet-narrator focalizes the river and his own tears as a means of overcoming
the distance between himself and home, it should be noted that by simply being a river flowing east “as
most rivers do in China”, the Wei river also possesses connotations of unending motion, longing and
the suffering of separation. 63 In fact, another mobile body of water featured prominently in Cen Shen's
59
“Passing West Through Weizhou: Seeing the Wei River I Think of the Qin Waters” (“Xi guo Weizhou jian Weishui si
Qin chuan” 西 过 渭 州 见 渭 水 思 秦 川 ).
60
“Encountering a Commissioner on His Way to the Capital” (“Feng ru jing shi” 逢 入 京 使 ).
61
“When Heading to Beiting and Passing Long Mountain I Think of Home” (“Fu Beiting du Long si jia” 赴 北 庭 度 陇 思
家 ).
62
CSJJZ, p. 75.
63
Burton Watson, Chinese Lyricism, p. 135; Hans Frankel, The Flowering Plum and Palace Lady, pp. 86-87; and Stephen
Owen, The Poetry of the Early T'ang, p. 130.