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habits in creating the literary frontier. The poem further differentiates itself against frequent
contributions to the frontier subgenre by being a work in which a vision of the northwest environs is
made not merely to convey emotion, such as homesickness or the painful pangs of separation, but to
show something which simply is. What Cen Shen offers is a topographical phenomenon explicitly at
odds with familiar geography by generating a mountain for a mountain's sake 151 while refusing to
relegate the rocks and heat of that mountain to a background position crouched behind the elucidation
of “frontier feelings” (bianqing 边 情 ). Rather than contort the frontier landscape into an emotional
expression, Cen Shen instead writes in order to indulge his curiosity and “interest in exotic scenery for
its own sake”. 152.
Besides the direct description just seen, two other common techniques for illustrating the
151
Kam-lung Ng, “Tangdai biansaishi yanjiu”, pp. 174, 176. Exposition of a topographical phenomenon that does not kneel
in service to the promulgation of a political, philosophical or emotional agenda is rare throughout the history of Chinese
poetry; the natural feature of a landscape, for the most part, was “not treated for itself as an aesthetic experience worthy of
expression in its own right”. See Donald Holzman, “Landscape Appreciation in Ancient and Early Medieval China: The
Birth of Landscape Poetry” in Chinese Literature in Transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (Brookfield, Vermont:
Ashgate Publishing Company, 1998), p. 25. Holzman discusses how the gradual evolution of the natural landscape in poetry
was a movement beginning with nature generally being restricted to symbolic import in Han and pre-Han poetry which then
led to such a class of imagery being indicative of the inhospitable and uncivilized until Daoism inspired poetry of the fourth
century (xuanyanshi 玄 言 诗 ) regarded the landscape both as an aesthetically beautiful entity worth admiring for itself while
simultaneously being capable of evoking a mystical feeling of oneness with the universe by functioning as a stepping stone
to a higher state of being.
152
Stephen Owen, The Great Age of Chinese Poetry, p. 153. By juxtaposing the two “Golden Forts” (Jincheng 金 城 ) of
Gao Shi's “The North Tower of Golden Fort” (“Jinchengbeilou” 金 城 北 楼 ) and Cen Shen's “From Yi Tower Looking
Out Over the Yellow River at Golden Fort” ( 题 金 城 临 河 驿 楼 ), this fascination of Cen Shen's for unusual sights for their
own sake becomes quite evident. Where Gao Shi devotes only four of eight lines of the poem to the scenery at Golden
Fort (“From the North Tower my westward gaze is filled with clear sky/Massed waters and linked mountain lovelier
than a painting/A swift current over the rapids, its sound like an arrow's/The waning moon over the fort – form of bent
bow” 北 楼 西 望 满 晴 空 , 积 水 连 山 胜 画 中 . 湍 上 急 流 声 若 简 , 城 头 残 月 势 如 弓 . See Stephen Owen, tr., The Great Age
of Chinese Poetry, p. 155; original poem also cited in Owen), Cen Shen assigns every line but the concluding couplet to
an incisive and penetrating description of the immediate environs, lines which compared to Gao Shi's offer a wider array
of focal depth and particular detail suggestive of the poet's interest in the frontier landscape as a worthy, standalone
object of poetic interest which only in the poem's final lines produce, almost out of an adherence to convention, gentle
pangs of homesickness: “The ancient fort rests at a major barrier/From its high tower I see out over Wu Liang/A postal
route winds its way along the base of the mountain/River waters soak the walls of the fort/Parrots nest in the courtyard
trees/Garden flowers hide fragrant musk/I'm suddenly back on the Changjiang shores/remembering a man catching fish
古 戍 依 重 险 , 高 楼 见 五 凉 . 山 根 盘 驿 道 , 河 水 浸 城 墙 . 庭 树 巢 鹦 鹉 , 园 花 隐 麝 香 . 忽 如 江 浦 上 , 忆 作 捕 鱼 郎 . See
CSJJZ, p. 143. Cen Shen's “Song of Hot Lake: Sending Off Censor Cui On His Return to the Capital” ( 热 海 行 送 催 侍 御
还 京 ) further evinces Cen Shen's attraction to unconventional frontier sights in and of themselves.