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44
表 请 回 军 淹 尘 骨
莫 教 兵 士 哭 龙 荒
112
Memorials sent to enquire about returning troops while
dust covers bones,
Don't allow the soldiers to sob in the wilds at
Dragon wall wastes. 113
Wang's withered, fallen leaves and late evening sands seem to share an aesthetic relation with an earlier
imaginative, and in retrospect very prototypical, frontier landscape devised by Chen Shubao 114 陈 叔 宝
in the first of two “Waters of Long Mountain” (“Longtou shui” 陇 头 水 ):
塞 外 飞 蓬 征
陇 头 流 水 鸣
漠 处 扬 沙 暗
波 中 燥 叶 轻
地 风 冰 易 厚
寒 深 溜 转 清
登 山 一 回 顾
115
幽 咽 动 边 情
Beyond the Great Wall flying tumbleweeds roam far,
The flowing waters of Long Mountain gurgle.
In desert lands the rising sands are dark,
In ripples dry leaves are light.
Winds across the ground, ice easily grows thick,
The cold is deep, currents and bends are clear.
Climbing the mountain, taking a look back,
A lonely moan moves frontier feelings.
The antecedent frontier landscape of the Southern dynasty was a kernel of developmental
possibilities that germinated in the Tang period when the thematic body of frontier poetry matured from
abstract and suggestive frontier sounds (biansheng 边 声 ) and frontier feelings (bianqing 边 情 ) into
sensually more precise images and intellectually complex responses to borderland realities. These wellrehearsed
and practised ways of representing a physical and emotive frontier in poetry would undergo a
transformation once the subgenre reached its apotheosis and greatest splendour during the High Tang. 116
112 Ibid.
113 “Dragon Wall” (Longcheng 龙 城 ) was where Xiongnu would gather to offer sacrifices to ancestors, heaven and ghosts
114 Chen Shubao (553-604) served as last emperor of the Southern dynasty state of Chen 陈 . The statement above about a
relation between the two frontier landscapes is not a claim of direct influence emanating from Chen Shubao to Wang
Changling, but rather how the frontier landscapes of Southern dynasty frontier poetry had established the language of
future frontier landscape descriptions, a language reverberating centuries later throughout the Tang.
115 YFSJ 21.313
116 Jiang Yuexia 蒋 月 侠 , “Tangdai biansai shi fazhan qiantan 唐 代 边 塞 诗 发 展 浅 探 ”Suzhou xueyuan xuebao 宿 州 学 院
学 报 2007.4, pp. 55-58, especially p. 56.