At first glance, the poem appears to have little to do with war. Ya Xian
employs a common structure in all three stanzas that focuses first on a
specific image, the cuckoo, the jasmine, and the raven; then makes a
seasonal reference to spring; provides scenes from a locale unique to
each area (the Asakusa district of Tokyo, Paris, and Kentucky), a
second reference to spring that includes a description of mood or tone,
a two-line refrain referring to the Chinese city of Luoyang, and then
repetitions of the second and then the first line of each stanza. The
tone in the first two stanzas is upbeat, with spring described at first as
“joyous” and then as “beautiful.” The images Ya focuses on, the
cuckoo and the jasmine, have positive connotations in nature, just as
the haiku and pointillism used to describe them are artistic in nature,
one a literary form and the other an art movement. In the third stanza,
the poet opens with the image of a raven and references to Edgar Allen
Poe, suggesting a bleak setting and a somber tone, as is revealed in the
reference to spring being “mournful” in line 23. The poet refers to
Kentucky and images associated with the nineteenth century American
West. Why does the poet suddenly shift the tone in the final stanza?
What does the recurring reference to Luoyang mean? How does war
play a role here?
Several of the images Ya has chosen are recurrent. The image of the
cross in the final stanza is used in a similar fashion in “The God of
War” where it symbolizes casualties of war. The presence of a cross
with a raven perching upon it suggests a cemetery in which cruciform
headstones mark a grave, most likely the graves of soldiers who died
in battle. The mournful tone evoked by the ominous references to the
color black, the raven, the Valley of the Dead, and the mournful
spring season support this reading. The city of Luoyang was also
referred to in the subtitle to “Wartime,” which reads “Luoyang
1942,” thus establishing the time and place in which the events
described in the poem occur. The allusion to “Wartime” thus links
“The Buckwheat Field” to war, specifically World War II. All four
countries mentioned in the poem—Japan, France, the United States,
and China—fought in the war and suffered military and civilian
casualties. But what of the buckwheat field referred to in the title?
Does it confirm a reading of the work as an example of Ya Xian’s war
poetry?
Images of buckwheat flowers or buckwheat fields occur in many of
Ya’s war poems. In an interview with Ya conducted at the University of
California, Davis, on May 29, 2002, he revealed that he chose buck-
wheat specifically because its flowers bloom white, the color of death in
Chinese traditional color symbolism (Ya 2002). This suggests that the
56 Steven L. Riep