New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry

Capturing War in the Poetry of Ya Xian 61

anticommunist literature promoted by the government and take
poetry in a new direction.
Ya’s critique of war also functions on a structural level as seen in his
attempts to halt the flow of time in his poetry. In the preface to The
Collected Poetry of Ya Xian, the poet writes: “Human life is like the
morning dew, and art lasts a thousand years. For me, the only thing on
earth that can resist time is probably poetry” (Ya 1981b: ii). He later
states that he hopes to “ascend against the current of the flow of time”
(Ya 1981b: ii). While Ya’s comments refer to his ambitions for his
poetry as a whole, this sensitivity to countering time also appears in
many of his war poems including “The God of War.” In the first and
last stanzas, he uses the image of a broken tower clock whose arms
have jammed in an upward position forming the letter “V,” which
ironically stand for victory:

In the evening
an evening of many black crosses
in the sick clock tower, two sisters die:
the minute hand and hour hand
their frozen arms paint a final V

....

Many black crosses, without names
cold feast for corpse-eating birds,
desolate tapping
in the sick clock tower, the pair
of dead sisters’
frozen arms paint a final V
(Ya 1981b: 48–50)

Time has become frozen because the clock has stopped, and the hands
are “frozen” in a V-shaped position. The result is a painfully ironic
symbol of the hollow victory that comes from war. By stopping time, the
poet has subverted closure and thus prevented any possible resolution
or alternative reading to the bleak portrait of war he depicts.
This stoppage of time occurs frequently in European literature dur-
ing and after World War I. Allyson Booth observes that “The clocks of
modernism seem... to cease ticking altogether” (Booth 1996: 117).
She illustrates this with a quote from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: “‘As
a cloud crosses the sun’, the narrator reports, ‘silence falls on London;
and falls on the mind. Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we
stop; there we stand’” (117). Booth traces this tendency toward the
freezing of time to the impact of new trends in warfare on those

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