flowers symbolize death and the buckwheat fields become the site of
death, representing battlefields or villages torn by war. We find this in
“The God of War,” where in line 13, the poet writes: “trampling
through many fields, the withering of the buckwheat flowers/at
Waterloo” %&^_田', éê的()/在*鐵,. Given the descrip-
tion of battle scenes in the third stanza and the mention of Waterloo in
line 14, the setting for the buckwheat flowers is most likely a battle-
field. Thus the subject of line 13, the person or persons who trample
the fields and cause the buckwheat to wither, refers to soldiers at war.
Buckwheat therefore represents the site of war and the crosses signify
those who die in the fighting. Similar images are found in both
“Wartime” and “The Colonel.” In the former, we find the phrase
“frightening a field of buckwheat” -.田éê(“Or startle a field
of buckwheat,” Ya 1981b: 67; Yip 1970: 53). This last image refers to
a battlefield since the most likely source of fear would be military
conflict and this would make the site of terror a place where battles
occur. In “The Colonel,” Ya specifies that “they encountered the
greatest battle of the war in a buckwheat field / and his leg bid him
farewell in 1943” (Ya 1981b: 145). The colonel suffers his disabling
injury in the midst of combat in a buckwheat field—a battlefield.
Now the meaning of the repeated parenthetic comment, “She
waited for me in Luoyang / waited for me in a buckwheat field,”
becomes clear. In “The God of War,” “Wartime,” and “The Colonel,”
Ya Xian consistently employs buckwheat fields or buckwheat flowers
as references to battlefields, which by extension are sites of human
suffering. The references to Luoyang, like those found in “Wartime,”
refer to one particular location plagued by fighting. The title of the
poem focuses the reader’s interest on the image of the buckwheat field,
and thus on battle and death.
Finally, Ya Xian tends to trivialize the suffering and trauma of war,
at once an ironic heightening of war’s significance and a critique of
war as an institution. This is best illustrated in “The Colonel,” where
Ya Xian uses satire to attack war in three different ways. First, he
underplays the incident in which the poetic subject loses his leg. What
would have been a moment of great trauma and pain is described in
comic tones in the phrasing in line 4, in which one of his legs literally
“bids farewell” or “parts” from him. The reader is not only prevented
from feeling sympathy for the victim and the physical and emotional
suffering he experiences, she is also blocked from reading the scene as
heroic—as might have been the case in a patriotic poem.
The second stanza, a single line in length, is the core of the poem:
“He has heard history and laughter” (Ya 1981b: 145/Yeh and
Capturing War in the Poetry of Ya Xian 57