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eastward movement (dong liu qu 东 流 去 ) to reduce the distance growing between his westward
movement into the frontier and his home located in the east of the country. A similar urge to contract
the endless space between oneself and home is also expressed in “Encountering a Commissioner on His
Way to the Capital”:
故 园 东 望 路 漫 漫
双 袖 龙 钟 泪 不 干
马 上 相 逢 无 纸 笔
67
凭 君 传 语 报 平 安
Gazing east towards home, the road goes on and on;
Both sleeves soaked with tears that do not dry.
We encounter each other on horseback, no paper or brush;
I depend on you to pass along word that I'm doing well.
As with the previous quatrain, the homesick psychological facet of the poet-narrator affects his
perception of one particular frontier setting existent, the commissioner ( 使 ), directing the focus of his
perception to the commissioner's eastward return to the capital. In so doing, the poet-narrator seeks to
rely or depend ( 凭 ) on the commissioner to act as a messenger and reduce the rift, if only briefly and
not physically, separating the poet-narrator from home.
Nostalgia, this time in “When Heading to Beiting and Passing Long Mountain I Think of
Home”, again motivates another incident of the poet-narrator perceiving an existent of the frontier
setting as being a possible suture for his homesick wounds, emotional injuries he continuously suffers
while travelling long distances west towards Luntai:
西 向 轮 台 万 里 余
也 知 乡 信 日 应 疏
陇 山 鹦 鹉 能 言 语
West towards Luntai is over ten thousand li,
I also know that letters from home will be scarcer
by the day.
The parrots 68 of Long mountain are able to speak:
67
CSJJZ, p. 77.
68
Another parrot of Long mountain can be found just under six hundred years earlier in Mi Heng's 弥 衡 (173-198)
“Rhapsody on a Parrot” (“Yingwu fu” 鹦 鹉 赋 ). The poem is “the most important extant work by Mi Heng...an eccentric,
unpredictable and sometimes arrogant young genius who lived at the end of the Han dynasty...It is ostensibly a
representative example of the subgenre of the rhapsody known as 咏 物 赋 (yongwu fu “rhapsody on an object”)...The
first third of the rhapsody is a treatment of the background and rare properties of the parrot. It is in the remaining sixtyodd
lines that the poet...expresses the parrot's misery over its fate and captive state...an allegorical plea to be freed from
his own captivity and allowed to return north [after having offended Cao Cao 曹 操 and banished south]”. See Robert
Joe Cutter's entry in William H. Nienhauser, Jr., ed., The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, pp. 625-
626 and William T. Graham, Jr., “Mi Heng's Rhapsody on a Parrot“, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1