Although it had its origins in the experience of war, the poem does not
pretend to describe reality, representing instead an inner landscape
that is externalized by way of symbolic images. The first two lines set
the scene but also immediately present a rift of rupture in the speaker’s
normal experience; by chance he happens to look up from some
ordinary activity and sees something that shatters his complacency.
Stunned, he sees a man fight against death at dawn, the start of a new
day. A human being’s naked confrontation with death provides the
epiphany that changes the speaker’s awareness. The man has no
weapons to fight an implacable and invincible enemy, and defeat
would seem inevitable. The third verse tells us as much: Death is
already inside him in the form of a black tributary flowing through his
veins. Death is thus characterized for two reasons: first, each individ-
ual’s death represents a small stream flowing into a larger sea of death;
second, each life is lived in tribute to Death. Observing all this, the
speaker’s reaction is one of shock and dismay. He turns his eyes away
from the scene and looks at the stone walls around him. As his eyes
sweep over the lifeless stone, blood begins to flow from the wall. The
imagery is stunning, but what is the reader to make of it?
The most problematic image in the first quintet is the bleeding stone
wall. This image is also related to the paradoxical title of the sequence,
Death of a Stone Cell. How can stone bleed and die? In the sequence,
the image functions on two levels. Blood flows from the stone just as
the black stream of death flows in the veins of a living man; life flows
invisibly in what is apparently lifeless, the way death flows undetected
inside what lives. Life and death are complementary, two parts of a
larger whole; to ignore one is to diminish the whole.
On another level, the image of the lifeless but bleeding stone wall
must be examined in light of the fact that the wall is a man-made
object. The wall can also be read as a symbol of modern man’s alien-
ated condition in that although it exists in fact, he did not necessarily
construct it himself. Marxist and existentialist philosophers hold that
the fate of man can be characterized by alienation. For Marx, alien-
ation consists of a system of relations that have become autonomous
against the very individuals who participated in creating it. In other
words, alienation consists in man creating a reality that does not
correspond to the intentions of his activities or his wishes and dreams
(Bottomore 1983: 9–11). In the modern world, the sum of man’s his-
torical conditioning—his fate—has become an inert lifeless mass that
stands against him like a stone wall.
Living under the constant threat of death on Quemoy certainly
influenced Luo Fu’s perception and understanding of life and destiny.
70 John Balcom