Capturing War in the Poetry of Ya Xian 59have died that her death has become insignificant and may, in fact,
eventually be forgotten. The image of drowning reminds us that his
mother in essence dies twice: once in the explosion and again when she
is forgotten.
Terminality and Circularity:
Experiments in Theme and Form
Reflecting on the foregoing discussion of Ya Xian’s work, we find that
the poet resists any promilitary position in his thoroughgoing critique
of war. On the thematic level, he adopts a terminal perspective by
using imagery and symbolism that focus on death and destruction and
convey a sense of pessimism and hopelessness. On the structural level,
he experiments with circular forms that prevent the possibility of
forward movement and halt the flow of time and action.
Terminality views the future as doomed, chaotic, and often apoca-
lyptic. It frequently invokes images of death and depersonalizes or
dehumanizes its subject. Fraught with pain and suffering, the terminal
world is characterized by feelings of hopelessness and despair where
attempts to alter the future prove futile because death and destruction
are seen as inevitable. In this mode of description, one “thinks of...
war in terms of its casualties” (Booth 1996: 110). The poem
“Wartime” focuses on death and dying from beginning to end. It
opens with the death of the poetic subject’s mother, which we learn in
the second stanza is forgotten amidst the many deaths that occurred in
the same period. The poem concludes with images of death in the final
stanza:
But all these things are already completed o&這6789成Å
The people were too tired to wait °;8倦x=5。/無?@Ø
and expect and after all ABCD與
you had to participate 草FGH。在T的II聲
In the making of grass amid KL— —
the buzzing of death; 8無需天N
And even—
Angels were no longer necessary.
(Ya 1981b: 67)
What has been “completed” is the devastation and death of war,
which has destroyed any sense of optimism or hope as people are now