China. However, the GMD-led military neither made gains in taking
territory nor made good on its pledge to retake China, such that the
war climate became one of waiting and watching rather than of con-
quering—a static situation analogous to the one Booth describes. At
the same time, Nationalist government rhetoric called for progress
that was translated into projects for national reconstruction framed as
a series of large-scale, multiyear national industrial development
plans. Planning, resources, and effort gradually shifted from an offen-
sive military posture to a defensive one accompanied by an aggressive
economic development strategy. Like the situation in Europe during
1910–1920, war in Taiwan became a static condition that continued
with no end in sight.
In this environment, Ya Xian’s poetry takes on new meaning. In
light of the prolongation of war and calls for progress on the economic
front, we can read his desire to stop the flow of time as a response to
the static nature of the war milieu and the forward motion of eco-
nomic progress. Turning again to “The God of War,” let us recall the
parallel opening and closing stanzas of the poem: the image of the
frozen clock hands that opens the poem appears again at the conclu-
sion, causing the poem to circle back on itself, ending where in fact it
had begun. This reminds us of Allyson Booth’s observation that liter-
ature tends “to circle around either a single moment or a series of
moments that overlap and repeat themselves” (108). Why does the
author use this particular structure? What does this circling imply?
In Modern Chinese Poetry: Theory and Practice Since 1917, Michelle
Yeh devotes a chapter to the use of circular structure in the works of
twentieth-century Chinese poets. She defines circularity as follows:
By circular structure I am referring to poems in which the beginning and
ending contain the same image or motif, which appears nowhere else.
The circular structure describes a pattern of return or a configuration of
symmetry. (Yeh 1991a: 91)This structure was used by a number of earlier poets including Kang
Baiqing, Liu Dabai, He Qifang, Sun Dayu a大b (1905–1997), and
Dai Wangshu, whose works Ya Xian had read and on which he had
written a series of articles that appeared in Epoch Poetry, as noted
earlier. Yeh persuasively argues that circularity offered a radical way
of closing a poem by first frustrating any “sense of finality” by
returning to the beginning of the poem and by transgressing the
linear nature of the poetic art by turning it back upon itself (92). She
suggests in her survey of pre-1949 modern poetry that writers used
Capturing War in the Poetry of Ya Xian 63