Page:A History of Japanese Literature (Aston).djvu/98

82 deeply, though in secret. About the 10th day of the first month she concealed herself elsewhere. He learned where she was living, but as it was a place where visits were impossible, he remained plunged in melancholy. In the first month of the following year, reminded of the previous spring by the flowering of the plum-trees before his house, he went to the Western Pavilion, and stood there gazing. But gaze as he might, there was to his mind no resemblance to the scene of the year before. At last he burst into tears, and laying himself down on the shattered floor, thought longingly of the bygone time until the moon went down. He composed this poem—

and then took his way homeward as the night was breaking into dawn."

A Western writer would have expanded this into a sonnet at least, but within the narrow bounds of thirty-one syllables prescribed by custom to the Japanese poet, it is hardly possible to express more forcibly the blank feeling of despair at the sight of familiar scenes which are no longer brightened by the presence of the loved one. The moon and spring flowers are there before his eyes, but as they do not move him as they did formerly,