Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/42

38 best part of his life of fifty years in travelling; travelling, or to use a better word, pilgrimage, for this Basho (“Basho” is his nom de plume, meaning banana-leaves whose flexibility against winds and autumn, he imagined, was that of his ephemeral life) was never searching after life’s selfish joy; it was a holy service itself, as if a prayer-making under the silence of a temple; is there a more holy temple than the bosom of Nature? He travelled East and West, again South and North, for the true realisation of the affinity of life and Nature, the sacred identification of himself with the trees and flowers; he could not forget Nature even at the final death moment when he wrote a Hokku poem saying:

The thought of Basho makes me think of Walt Whitman; the above poem of Basho’s recalls to my mind Whitman’s pathos of his last years: “I am an open-air man: winged. I am an open-water man: aquatic. I want to get out, fly, swim I am eager for feet again. But my feet are eternally gone.” I read somewhere of Whitman denying the so-called “literature” (accidentally laughing, scorning, jeering at his contemporaries). “I feel about literature what Grant did about war. He hated war. I hate