Page:Insect Literature by Lafcadio Hearn.djvu/246

Rh dodoitsu, consisting of twenty-six syllables; and the hokku, consisting of only seventeen. The vast majority of dragon-fly poems are in hokku. There are scarcely any poems upon the subject in dodoitsu, and—strange to say!—but very few in the classical tanka. The friend who collected for me all the verses quoted in this essay, and many hundreds more, declares that he read through fifty-two-volumes of thirty-one-syllable poetry in the Imperial Library before he succeeded in finding a single composition about dragon-flies; and eventually, after much further research, he was able to discover only about a dozen such poems in tanka.

The reason for this must be sought in the old poetical conventions. Japanese thirty-one-syllable poetry is composed according to rules that have been fixed for hundreds of years. These rules require that almost every subject treated shall be considered in some relation to one of the seasons. And this should be done in accordance with certain laws of grouping,—long-established conventions of association, recognized both in painting and in poetry: for example, the nightingale should be mentioned, or portrayed, together with the plum-tree; the sparrow, with the bamboo; the cuckoo, with the moon; 註