Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/49

Rh verses have all indicated the season as spring. To give a parallel in the graphic arts, one may compare the linked-verse with the Japanese horizontal scroll (emakimono). As we unroll one of the scrolls with our left hand we simultaneously roll up a correspondingly long section with our right hand. No matter which segment of the scroll we see at one time, it makes a beautiful composition, although when we examine it as a whole it possesses no more unity than a river landscape seen from a moving boat. Linked-verse at its best produces a somewhat similar effect.

The raising to so high an artistic level of what had originally been a kind of parlour game meant that it was necessary for the fierce warrior who sought comfort in verse, or for any other amateur poet, to find some newer and simpler verse-form. The new form which developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the haikai or “free” linked-verse. In contrast to the traditional linked-verse, which had been full of cherry-blossoms, willows and pale moonlight, the free linked-verse delighted in mentioning such humble things as weeds, running noses, and even horse-dung. In time, of course, the new poetic diction became as stereotyped as the old, but the first result of the absence of formal rules in the free linked-verse was the release of floods of linked-verse and of haiku, a new form derived by making an independent unit of the opening verse of a linked-verse series. It is sometimes also called hokku, or haikai. One man is said to have composed 20,000 verses in a single day. Obviously the quality of all of these verses cannot