Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/39

Rh his enthusiasm over Hokku: “That is valuable as a talisman rather than as a picture. It is a pearl to be dissolved in the wine of a mood. Pearls are not wine, nor in themselves to be thought of as a drink, but there is a kind of magic in the wine in which they are dissolved.” That magic of the Hokku poems is the real essence of lyrical poetry even of the highest order. I do not see why we cannot call them musical when we call the single note of a bird musical; indeed, they attain to a condition, as Pater remarked, which music alone completely realises, because what they aim at and practise is the evocation of mood or psychological intensity, not the physical explanation, and they are, as I once wrote:

And even from the narrow scientific understanding of the term they are musical, as they are the first seventeen syllables out of the euphonic thirty-one-syllable Uta poem, whose birth, according to the mythological assumption, was in the same time when heaven and earth were created; a reader who knows no Japanese will find his ears softened, to take one at random, on hearing the following Hokku poem: