Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/100

96 as to-day, must be regarded fairly; they give a delightful relief to our minds. In them he has a strong claim. He was a poet of sentiment, almost inclined to be sentimental; he was always delicate, and often sad. (I should like to know where is a Japanese poet who is not sad.) He hated, as any other Japanese poet, the song of wisdom, faith, and liberty; he was flexible in his mind, extremely facile in ear and voice. His voice was that of a youth which has never received any deep scratch from life; and his love, which was passionate enough, but not from real experience, was only a speculation of his dream; and then, the shade and colour of his love were very young, always fresh. He was a poet of Spring, when the flowers commingle with the birds to complete a beautiful concert.

He was not a Tennyson who had a Keats and a Shelley for his predecessors; in one sense, he was an originator. We cannot so severely criticise his diction, which, in fact, cannot be compared with that of a later poet who has boundless vocabularies at his command. He is a poet of a few words; with a few words, he wrote a far better poem than you could expect. And he was not a poet of a few great poems; we must see him as a whole; it is true that he has no wonderful expressions nor separate lines for quotation. However, it is delightful to notice that he could not pretend to a feeling which he