Page:A History of Japanese Literature (Aston).djvu/48

32 "house-bird" cock, the "rain-enshrouded" Mount Mikasa, the "ever-firm" heaven, "morning-mist" thought-wandering. But even although a Makura-Kotoba may be sufficiently apt if it is rightly applied, some Japanese poets take a perverse pleasure in wresting it from its proper sense in a way which to us is nothing short of ludicrous. "Whale-catching," for example, may pass as an epithet of the sea. But what shall we say of the poet who uses it as a prefix to the inland sea of Ōmi, now called Lake Biwa, where, needless to observe, whales are an unknown phenomenon? "Creeper-clad" is well enough as an epithet of a rock, but it tries one's patience a little to find it applied to the province of Iwami, simply because Iwa means rock.

From the versifier's point of view the Makura-Kotoba is a very useful institution. It consists almost invariably of five syllables, and therefore supplies him without any trouble with a first line ready made, no unimportant consideration when the entire poem consists of only thirty-one syllables. These epithets are several hundreds in number, and are collected into dictionaries which serve the purpose of a Gradus ad Parnassum. They are most useful in a country where the composition of Tanka has been for centuries little more than a mere mechanic art.

Another trick of the Japanese poet is what Mr. Chamberlain has aptly termed "pivot-words." In these a word or part of a word is used in two senses, one with what precedes, the other with what follows. Thackeray has something of the kind in The Newcomes, where he speaks of the tea-pot presented to Mr. Honeyman by the devotees attending his chapel as the "devotea-pot." Here the syllable "tea" is contrived a double debt to