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both the dead and those left alone who may “literally [be] orphans... or the survivors of battles 31 :
苍 苍 丁 零 塞 A blue sky over the passes to Ding-ling, 32
今 古 缅 荒 途
Past and present, roads stretching far into wilderness.
亭 堠 何 摧 兀
How the battlements of frontier forts have crumbled,
暴 骨 无 全 躯
Bones bleaching in the sun, no bodies whole.
黄 沙 漠 南 起
Yellow sands rise south of the Gobi
白 日 隐 西 隅
As the bright sun sinks under the western horizon.
汉 甲 三 十 万
Three hundred thousand Chinese troops
曾 以 事 匈 奴
Have indeed done service against the Xiongnu.
但 见 沙 场 死
One sees only the dead of the battlefields
33
谁 怜 塞 上 孤 No one pities those left alone on the frontiers. 34
Unlike the preceding poems from the Book of Songs which only indicate military conflict by
naming the actions undertaken by the speaker or absent husband without providing specific details of
those events themselves, 35 “Gathering Ferns” relays information about the battle transpiring in its lines
without relying solely on subtle suggestion 36 but by drawing attention to the instruments required for
carrying out armed conflict. Granted, this is still synecdoche; however, the relationship between the
part (the tools of war) and whole (the battle) is quite intimate and more direct in revealing the existence
of combat than the techniques used in the previously cited poems. The following two excerpts are
31 Stephen Owen, The Poetry of the Early T'ang, p.220
32 The Ding-ling were an ancient tribe from which the Xiongnu descended. See Richard M. W. Ho, Ch'en Tzu-Ang:
Innovator in T'ang Poetry, p.90.
33 Original text cited from Stephen Owen, The Poetry of the Early T'ang, p.220
34 Slight modification of Stephen Owen, tr., ibid, p. 220.
35 Such as simply being “in service” (yi 役 , military surface or forced labour) or “subduing” ( 平 , ping) another group of
people who or may not be of the same ethnicity (ie not Xianyun) as a means of indicating that war is occurring.
36 This is not to say that the poem is a cacophony of crashing swords or a sanguine flood of bleeding soldiers. Chinese
poetry is rarely graphic in its depictions of military conflict, and in fact usually maintains an “ellipsis of battle” even
when armies clash. See C. H. Wang, “Towards Defining a Chinese Heroism” Journal of the American Oriental Society
Vol. 95 No. 1 (Jan. to March 1975), pp.25-35, especially part three of the essay. Marie Chan makes a similar observation
about the tendency to elide battle in Chinese verse in her comparison between later poetic renderings of the story of Jing
Ke's 荆 轲 attempted assassination of the King of Qin (see chapter 86 of the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji 史 记 ))
and its presentation in the Shiji noting that “the large number of poems written on this historical episode...never dwell
upon the fierce and gory feats which are so prominent in the original history...Instead the poet's mind is stirred by [the
brief] scene of pathos of grief [when Jing Ke parts company with Prince Dan of Yan ( 燕 太 子 丹 ) at the Yi 易 river on
his way to assassinate the king of Qin]” See Marie Chan, “Chinese Heroic Poems and European Epic” Comparative
Literature Vol. 26 No. 2 (1974), pp.142-168, especially p. 145.