60 Steven L. Riep
“too tired to wait and expect.” The concluding lines amplify the sense
of hopelessness by noting that angels have no power or function in this
war-ravaged world, thus signifying that help from a higher source is
unlikely.
“Naples,” which contains numerous descriptions of the destruc-
tion wrought by war, can be read as a companion piece to “Wartime.”
The poem opens by describing statues of women buried in rubble from
bombings. The smiles on the statues seem ironic in light of the destruc-
tion that they signify. The theme of destruction continues with a
mixing of natural imagery including ivy “losing its last defenses”
失Ä最{的防Q and an incendiary bomb described as a “tree of
flame” (Ya 1981b: 126 and 351–352). Ya Xian moves from physical
damage to human suffering in the fourth stanza with the images of
orphaned children playing on streets after bombings. References in the
fifth stanza to nameless children, who are described as flowers of
unknown origin, support this reading. The poem concludes with
images of death seen in closing references to the cross scratched with a
bayonet and the view of Naples’s future as “worse than the poisonous
rose” RST瑰VW的(Ya 1981b: 128 and 350).
The concluding stanza of “The Buckwheat Field” likewise captures
the hopelessness brought by war. The references to the raven and Poe
echo the mood of a “mournful spring.” The images of crosses and the
allusion to the Valley of the Dead symbolize death, which extends also
to the references to the buckwheat field in Luoyang that appear as a
refrain in each stanza. The poem’s shift from the beauty and joy dis-
cussed in the first two stanzas to sadness in the last underscores the
movement toward death that lays concealed in the battlefield reference
in the refrain. Terminality takes a different twist in “The Colonel”
where we see an example of the future made trivial by the quotidian.
The poem moves from the past and its historical meaning to a present
in which only day-to-day events and objects hold significance and the
only challenge comes from the passage of time and the inevitable
approach of death.
The views of war and the future expressed in the poems of Ya Xian
either offer a catalog of negative images—death, destruction, suffer-
ing—or focus on their utter meaninglessness. Ya’s poetry either drains
war of any positive meaning or, as in the case of “The Colonel,” drains
it of all meaning and significance. Read in the context of the late-
1950s and early-1960s, a period when the Nationalist military
establishment wielded considerable power in a society under martial
law and during which the Nationalist government still called for
reunification by armed force, these poems fly in the face of the