Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/33

Rh The main concern is how to regulate and arrange Nature; before arranging and regulating Nature, you have to regulate and arrange your own life. The thoughts of life and death, let me say, do not approach me; let me live in the mighty serenity of the Eternal! By the virtue of death itself, life grows really meaningful; let us welcome death like great Rikiu who, being forced to harakiri by his master’s suspicion, drank the “last tea of Rikiu” with his beloved disciples, and passed into the sweet Unknown with a smile and song on his face for the very turn of the page.

When I think on my ideal poet, I always think about our old Japanese tea-masters who were the true poets, as I said before, of the true action; it was their special art to select and simplify Nature, again to make her concentrate and emphasise herself according to their own thought and fancy. Let me tell you one story which impresses me still as quite a poetical revelation as when I heard it first.

Three or four tea-masters, the aestheticists of all aestheticists, headed by famous Rikiu, were once invited by Kwanpaku Hidetsugu, a feudal lord of the sixteenth century, to his early morning tea; the month was April, the day the twentieth, whose yearning mind was yet struggling to shake off the gray-haired winter’s despotism. The dark breezes, like evil spirits who feared the approach of sunlight, were huddling around under