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historical displacement (Han allusion) and frontier place names separated, in the world outside of the
poem, by hundreds of miles are also represented in Wang's series of poems; Liu's ghostly presence
testifies not only to the powerful motivation behind Xiao Chengyu's third facet of frontier poetry
(poems in which the frontier environment receives sustained treatment) but also to the reach of
Southern dynasty works and their influence over how the frontier landscape was created in language.
For instance, the summarizing scene in the final line of the second of Wang's “In the Army” ( 从
军 行 七 首 ) quatrains is replete with an evolved autumnal background of astral cold and synesthetic
darkness, a night not of darkness visible but one infused with a feeling of astronomical distance sitting
motionless between the Great Wall and the moon shining high above. The architectural behemoth's own
being answers the hanging moon on the terrestrial plane by reinforcing notions of distance
accompanying the bifurcation of interiority and exteriority, home and abroad, along its equally
boundless design. The interminable endlessness of the frontier landscape in Liu's poem is limited to the
geographic horizontal plane; Wang's century later piece infuses the frontier's open, non-delineated
space with vertical and emotional aspects of separation:
琵 琶 起 舞 换 新 声
总 是 关 山 旧 别 情
撩 乱 边 愁 听 不 尽
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高 高 秋 月 照 长 城
The pipa starts a dance changing to a new tune,
Always the mountain pass invoking feelings of separation.
Cacophony of frontier sadness heard on and on,
At great height the autumn moon shines on the Great Wall.
The third work in the seven poem set marries the frontier again to the images of distance, decay and
dreariness, characteristics of the physical frontier which in Liu's text had yet to reach Wang's rich
condensation:
关 城 榆 叶 早 疏 黄
日 暮 云 沙 古 战 场
Elm leaves at the frontier pass yellow and scatter early,
Sunset, clouds of sand, ancient battlefield.
111 QTS 143.1444