Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/107

Rh echoes of Rossetti even in his latest work. (By the way, he is the author of some four books of poems, the latest being Ariake Shu.) To have a support at the start is nothing particularly bad; but at the same time it is enough of a disadvantage. It is a question of genuineness for poetry; realisation is the main thing.

He has been often charged with vagueness; I should say that he has only to smile over such a charge. We are rather glad that he has no aim of amusing his readers in fact, there he shows a poet’s dignity. Vagueness is often a virtue; a god lives in a cloud; truth cannot be put on one’s finger-tip. The darkness of night is beauty; that is only another view of the light of day. Still we know that when a poet is great, he always goes back to the simplicity of nature; there may come a time for him when he will cry for that simplicity as a child for his mother’s milk. In fact, when he returned to simplicity he was most delightful, as in the case of Browning; read one of his poems called “Shu no Madara” or “The Dark Red Shadow-Spots” with the following lines somewhere:

Between the spaces, Of acacia branches commingled, Spread on The shining crown of clouds.

Two alone in the shadowy lane, You and I; Oh how lovely, The fragrance of the green!