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81
无 花 只 有 寒
笛 中 闻 折 柳
春 色 未 曾 看
162
No flowers, only cold.
Within the sounds of the flute one hears the tune
“Snapping the Willow”, 161
Spring scenes have yet to be seen.
(lines 1-4)
As with Zhang's work, the frontier in Li Bai's poem is also an area of antithesis, a Spring aligned with
Winter and refusing to behave as a vernal season ought to act: instead of blossoms there is snow and
cold; where copulatory buzzing should be tickling the atmosphere there is only the music of separation.
In short, the peculiar is relayed through the ordinary, and a landscape intended to convey a sense of the
non-commonplace appears out of the absence of the everyday.
Cen Shen, while still at times “continu[ing] to define the frontier in formulaic terms”, 163
attempts in many of his frontier poems to “integrate...new experience[s] into [the poetic] tradition”, 164
to “take...existing patterns [of the frontier subgenre] and stretch...[them] dangerously close to the limits
that the pattern [would] permit without ceasing to be a pattern” 165 . As with the previously cited works,
Cen Shen's poet-narrator also relies on negation in the anatomy of his frontier landscape, as in “Seventh
161
“Snapping the Willow” (“Zheyangliu” 折 杨 柳 ) is a yuefu title. The snapping and presentation of a willow branch was a
gesture made at parting. There are numerous examples of this title from the Six Dynasty period as well as the Tang. The
first line of the Six Dynasty poet Wang Cuo's 王 瑳 “Snapping the Willow“ – Beyond the frontier no Spring scenes/the
willows in Shanglin are already yellow” 塞 外 无 春 色 , 上 林 柳 已 黄 (YFSJ 22.330) – harmonizes with the opening of Li
Bai's “Below the Frontier” until the latter pounds its way off to battle.
162
QTS 164.1700.
163
Marie Chan, “Frontier Poems of Ts'en Shen”, p. 430.
164
Marie Chan, Cen Shen, p. 77. Chan further writes that it would have been impossible for Cen Shen to “completely
repudiate his poetic lineage” by distancing himself from recognized tropes and write entirely of the weird and
wonderful; to do so would cause his frontier poems to “fail as an instrument of communication”. The natural imagery of
China's far northwestern regions did not possess the associative power of flora and fauna native to central and southern
China, objects which in their poetic environment resonated with certain expectations between writers and readers. Were
Cen Shen to completely indulge in the “unknown Central Asian landscape”, the “social and cultural” aspects of his
poems would become vacuous. However, “simply submit[ting]...to the demands of tradition would [have] produce[d]
mere... stereotypes” (Marie Chan, ibid., pp. 76-77). Instead, Cen Shen's frontier poetry orbits a binary system of the
familiar and unfamiliar in which the known and unknown, both in image and sentiment, fuse together to produce poetic
worlds which are ruled neither by the fantastic nor the prosaic.
165
Marie Chan, “The Frontier Poems of Ts'en Shen”, p. 434.