The Tang dynasty poet Wang Changling 王昌齡 (ca. 690-ca. 756), renowned for his mastery of the jueju 絕句 (quatrain) form, has been praised specifically for having brought a lyric sensibility to the heptasyllabic quatrain: a poetic genre most closely associated with yuefu themes and technical complexity. To the extent that such praise is responding to something specific in Wang's poems, they present a fine opportunity to investigate precisely how a lyric subjectivity is constructed on the basis of the limited poetic vocabulary afforded by stock themes, archetypal characters, and stylized surroundings. Noting that Wang is especially adept at using visual (and occasionally auditory) cues to convey the inner state of the personae that inhabit his quatrains, and taking into account the importance he apparently places on establishing a bodily presence within a given poem (as expressed in his attributive essay "Lun wenyi" 論文意 [On Writing]), this article performs a close reading of the perceptual cues featured in the five heptasyllabic quatrains, "Autumn in the Palace of Everlasting Faith" 長信秋詞. Borrowing the term focalization from recent theories of visual narrativity (most notably as applied by Mieke Bal), and applying it to these poems over the course of this close reading exercise, the essay demonstrates that the lyric power of these poems stems not from the communication of the poet's inner state on the specific occasion that inspired his writing but from his use of the senses to construct a fluid, shifting, and permeable subjectivity-one that can, at moments, encompass the reader and the poet.
