Part 13

AFTER LONG ABSENCE

The garden that once I loved, and even the hedge of the garden,— All is changed and strange: the moonlight only is faithful;— The moon alone remembers the charm of the time gone by!

MOONLIGHT ON THE SEA

O vapory moon of spring!—would that one plunge into ocean Could win me renewal of life as a part of thy light on the waters!

AFTER FAREWELL

Whither now should! look?—where is the place of parting? Boundaries all have vanished;—nothing tells of direction: Only the waste of sea under the shining moon!

HAPPY POVERTY

Wafted into my room, the scent of the flowers of the plum-tree Changes my broken window into a source of delight.

AUTUMN FANCIES

(1) Faded the clover now;—sere and withered the grasses: What dreams the matsumushi in the desolate autumn-fields?

(2) Strangely sad, I thought, sounded the bell of evening;— Haply that tone proclaimed the night in which autumn dies!

(3) Viewing this autumn-moon, I dream of my native village Under the same soft light,—and the shadows about my home.

A musical cricket—calyptotryphus marmoratus.

IN TIME OF GRIEF, HEARING A SÉMI (CICADA)

Only “I,” “I,”—the cry of the foolish semi! Any one knows that the world is void as its cast-off shell.

ON THE CAST-OFF SHELL OF A SÉMI

Only the pitiful husk!… O poor singer of summer, Wherefore thus consume all thy body in song?

SUBLIMITY OF INTELLECTUAL POWER

The mind that, undimmed, absorbs the foul and the pure together— Call it rather a sea one thousand fathoms deep!

This is quite novel in its way,—a product of the University: the original runs thus:—

Nigoréru mo Suméru mo tomo ni Iruru koso Chi-hiro no umi no Kokoro nari-keré!

SHINTŌ REVERY

Mad waves devour The rocks: I ask myself in the darkness, “Have I become a god?” Dim is The night and wild!

“Have I become a god?”—that is to say, “Have I died?—am I only a ghost in this desolation?” The dead, becoming kami or gods, are thought to haunt wild solitudes by preference.

The poems above rendered are more than pictorial: they suggest something of emotion or sentiment. But there are thousands of pictorial poems that do not; and these would seem mere insipidities to a reader ignorant of their true purpose. When you learn that some exquisite text of gold means only, “Evening-sunlight on the wings of the water-fowl,”—or,”Now in my garden the flowers bloom, and the butterflies dance,”—then your first interest in decorative poetry is apt to wither away. Yet these little texts have a very real merit of their own, and an intimate relation to Japanese aesthetic feeling and experience. Like the pictures upon screens and fans and cups, they give pleasure by recalling impressions of nature, by reviving happy incidents of travel or pilgrimage, by evoking the memory of beautiful days. And when this plain fact is fully understood, the persistent attachment of modern Japanese poets—notwithstanding their University training—to the ancient poetical methods, will be found reasonable enough.

I need offer only a very few specimens of the purely pictorial poetry. The following—mere thumb-nail sketches in verse—are of recent date.

LONESOMENESS

Furu-dera ya: Kané mono iwazu; Sakura chiru.