It is precisely this distinction between encircled China and the rest of the world in which both full and the traditional present make their first
adumbrative appearance.
(8) Within this context, the earlier scene with Grinning Boy becomes an
adumbrative moment of masking and displacement, where potentially homosexual desires manifested themselves in more "masculinely-correct" codes of hypersexual and hyperviolent conduct.
Not wanting to alarm his or her readers unduly with these worrying
adumbrative reminders of May 1871, however, Walker again offers reassurance, though not without a touch of characteristic irony accompanied by an oblique, but unmistakable, reference to the recent past:
"Self-defense" seemingly becomes too
adumbrative a concept to meet even liberal interpretations of Article 9 under these measures.
There, "The awful shadow of some unseen Power / Floats though unseen among us," an
adumbrative presence suggesting that "Power" itself is somehow responsible for "This various world" (1-3).