Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/38

26 {| cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 It remains true to this day that poetry is not felt to be exclusively the business of poets, or even of educated people. This is partially because of the simplicity of Japanese prosody, partially also because the range of the poetry is so limited.
 * fude toranu||Is there, I wonder,
 * hito mo arō ka||A man without pen in hand—
 * kyō no tsuki||The moon tonight!
 * }
 * kyō no tsuki||The moon tonight!
 * }

The prosody of Japanese has been determined by the nature of the language. Stress accent, or quantity, the two most common features of European poetry, are ruled out by their absence in Japanese. This is true, of course, of French poetry as well, but the excessive facility of rhyme in Japanese, where every syllable ends in a simple vowel and there are no consonant clusters, deprives the language of this mainstay of French poetry. Japanese verses, then, came to be based on the syllable-count, and different types of poetry are usually distinguished by the number of syllables they contain. Thus, the tanka is a poem in 31 syllables, arranged in lines of 5, 7, 5, 7 and 7 syllables. The haiku, a more recent development, contains 17 syllables, in three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables. In these two forms and in variants based on them is to be found almost all of what Japanese consider to be poetry. As may well be imagined, it is no great problem to compose a verse in only 31 or 17 syllables, without rhyme or metre, but it must be added that it is as difficult in Japanese as in any other language to write anything of value.

The range of the poetry is limited both by the shortness of the verses and also by what it was felt proper to include in a poem. The shortness is responsible, among other things, for the lack of true narrative poetry, since, obviously, very little can be related in 31 syllables, much less 17. But the shortness alone is not accountable for another feature, the rarity of poems of an