circularity to, among other things, describe closed states of mind
and convey feelings of frustration or futility that came as they sub-
verted closure. In later poetry, particularly in the work of Shang
Qin, we find “circularity at its most negative” when Shang uses
the technique to convey fragmentation, disruption, fear, and the
inescapability of death (105).
The emotions Yeh links to the use of circularity correspond with the
view of war found in our earlier analysis of the terminal qualities of Ya
Xian’s poetry. The inescapability of suffering and death as well as the
disruption of everyday life and routine found in his war poems paral-
lel the disruption brought to the lives of war’s victims, both children
and adults, and to combatants and civilians alike. Just as the image of
the frozen clock hands stop time, the presence of this same image at
both the opening and closing of “The God of War” reminds us that we
cannot escape from war. The cloud of fear that hung over Taiwan
when Ya Xian wrote these works hangs over his poetry as well,
brought on the thematic level by terminality and on the structural level
by circularity. Ya’s treatment of war looks beyond the strictly Chinese
historical context and treats the impact of combat on human civiliza-
tion in general. Less lyrical and more detached than other poets, Ya’s
commentary avoids excessive moralizing or Sinocentric patriotism and
frames its observations of society in more universal terms.
Notes
- While the poet spells his name Ya Xian, he prefers to pronounce it Ya
Xuan, which means a mute string or strings (Palandri 1972: 144). - War is used in making reference to time (as in “prewar” [戰c, Ya 1981a:
217] or “postwar” [戰{, 200]); military paraphernalia (armor [甲e, 56],
scabbards [鞘, 102], shields [μg, 56], bugles [兵I的喇j, 147],
banners [kº, 56], bayonets [ª刀, 164], atomic weapons [“the bomb” in
English, 212–213] and more general references to cavalry horses [55 and
102]); people impacted by war (blind prisoners of war lm的戰n[100],
soldiers [100 and 216], and White Russian officers 3 op[150]);
historical references to past wars (Chi You qr [96], Athenian War
s典戰[158]), and even the terms “war” (戰u, 212) and “revolution”
(革v, 70) themselves. - This use of the beautiful to describe the horrors of war recalls Wen Yiduo’s
landmark poem “Dead Water” (Sishui), in which Wen elevates the ordinary
or ugly to the sublime in order to reveal the beauty of the quotidian and to
problematize conventional notions of the beautiful (see Yeh 1992: 17).
64 Steven L. Riep