Page:A History of Japanese Literature (Aston).djvu/82

66 the smoke which rises from Mount Fuji, when they longed for a friend with the yearning of the cry of the matsumushi [a kind of cicada], when the sight of the pair of fir-trees of Takasago and Suminoye suggested a husband and wife growing old together, when they thought of their bygone days of manly vigour, or grudged to the past the one time of maiden bloom, it was with poetry that they comforted their hearts. Again, when they looked upon the flowers shed from their stalks on a spring morning, or heard the leaves falling on an autumnal eve, or every year lamented the snow and waves [i.e. grey hairs] reflected in a mirror; or, seeing the dew upon the grass or the foam upon water, were startled to recognise in them emblems of their own lives; or else, but yesterday in all the pride of prosperity, to-day, with a turn of fortune, saw themselves doomed to a wretched life, those dear to them estranged; or again drew metaphors from the waves and the fir-clad mountain or the spring of water in the midst of the moor, or gazed on the under leaves of the autumn lespedeza, or counted the times a snipe preens its feathers at dawn, or compared mankind to a joint of bamboo floating down a stream, or expressed their disgust with the world, by the simile of the river Yoshino, or heard that the smoke no longer rises from Mount Fuji, or that the bridge of Nagara had been repaired—in all these cases poetry it was by which they soothed their hearts."

The above are allusions to well-known poems. Tsurayuki traces briefly the history of Japanese poetry in the Nara period, and then goes on to speak of the more recent poets whose effusions find a place in the collection he had made. The following may have some interest as the earliest example of literary criticism in Japan:—