Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/40

36 Or again in the following by the same author, Buson Yosano (1716–1783):

Such brevity of poetical form might be well compared with an eight-coloured butterfly or a white dew upon summer grasses; again, with a tiny star carrying the whole large sky at its back. When I say that the Hokku poet’s chief aim is to impress the readers with the high atmosphere in which he is living, I mean that the readers also should be those living in an equally high poetical atmosphere; such readers’ minds will certainly respond to the wistfulness and delicacy of the Hokku, a wistfulness and delicacy not to be met with in the general run of English poetry.