Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/26

22 my Japanese mind. If I be blamed as unintelligible from too much rejection, I have only to say that the true poetry should be written only to one's own heart to record the pain or joy, like a soul's diary whose sweetness can be kept when it is hidden secretly, or like a real prayer for which only a few words uttered are enough. Here I am reminded of a particular Hokku, a rain-poem like Miss Reese's, by Buson Yosano of the eighteenth century:

Of the samidare rain List to the Utsubo Bashira pipe! These ears of my old age!"

Is it unbelievable to you when I tell you that such is a complete Japanese poem, even a good poem? The poem, as you see, in such a Lilliputian form of seventeen syllables in the original, carries my mind at once to the season's rain and the Utsubo Bashira, or Pipe of Emptying, that descends from the eaves (how like a Japanese poem with a singular distinction of inability to sing!), to which the poet Buson's world-wearied old ears awakened; you will see that the "hundred things and more that come in at the door" of his mind should be understood, although he does not say it. Indeed, you are the outsider of our Japanese poems if you cannot read immediately what they do not describe to you.