Border Song, V: The Hunt

Lines 1–2 · Preparations and reputation

調箭 and 呼鷹 make the scene a hunt before any prey appears. 又 adds the hawk to the readied arrows. 出世能 praises a skill outside the ordinary run of human ability. The English gives that sense directly, while 俱聞 shifts from what the hunter does to what people have heard of him.

Lines 3–4 · From a fox to the hills

奔 belongs to the fox’s running. The pheasant’s movement is compressed into 送雉, the wording in the selected Yuefu shiji text. In the familiar 迸雉 reading, the pheasants burst out. The English “are flushed out” follows 送 while leaving the agent unstated. 掃盡 then changes the scale of the hunt. After watching two kinds of prey move, the reader is asked to imagine a sweep of the whole terrain. 古丘陵 gives that moment of speed a landscape with a far longer life.

This complete five-character quatrain begins with preparation, states reputation, then supplies energetic evidence. The parallel fox and pheasant bring two kinds of movement together. The final sweep enlarges a few actions into a display across the hills.

See jueju for the larger formal pattern. Pinyin gives modern Mandarin pronunciation; a historical level/oblique grid is not inferred from those modern tones.

The fifth Border Song connects hunting prowess with the martial portrait developed by the sequence. Its praise of extraordinary skill belongs to the poem’s occasion and rhetoric. Reading it beside the arrow-in-stone episode shows two different ways the series magnifies the commander’s capacity.

Continue with Lu Lun and the frontier reading path. Compare Border Song, II: The Arrow in the Stone and Border Song, VI: Honor in the Portrait Gallery using the reading connections below.