Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/23

Rh is that of the moon, stars, and flowers, that of a bird and waterfall for the noisiest. If we do not sing so much of Life and the World it is not from the reason that we think their value negative, but from our thought that it would be better, in most cases, to leave them alone, and not to sing of them is the proof of our reverence toward them. Besides, to sing the stars and the flowers in Japan means to sing Life, since we human beings are not merely a part of Nature, but Nature itself. When our Japanese poetry is best, it is, let me say, a searchlight or flash of thought or passion cast on a moment of Life and Nature, which, by virtue of its intensity, leads us to the conception of the whole; it is swift, discontinuous, an isolated piece. So it is the best of our seventeen-syllable Hokku and thirty-one syllable Uta poems that by their art, as Tsurayuki remarks in his Kokinshiu preface "without an effort, heaven and earth are moved, and gods and demons invisible to our eyes are touched with sympathy"; the real value of the Japanese poems may be measured by what mood or illusion they inspire in the reader's mind.

It is not too much to say that an appreciative reader of poetry in Japan is not made, but born, just like a poet; as the Japanese poetry is never explanatory, one has everything before him on which to let his imagination freely play; as a result he will come to have an almost personal