Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/45

Rh Although the poet simply appears to recollect the past (making objectivity in poetical expression reveal his subjectivity clearer through the virtue of the poem’s being a good Hokku), the meaning that he is ready to depart when fate calls upon him will be well understood by those whose spiritual endowment is rich enough to read the part of silence. I can point out sometimes a Hokku effect of poetry even from the works of Tennyson and Browning; it is not too much to say that many of Wordsworth’s poems could be successfully turned as series of Hokku poems. My humanity always thrills, trembles in reading “The Toys,” from Coventry Patmore’s The Unknown Eros, as if, when I read Chiyo’s lamentation over her dead boy, a little thing really worthy of a place in any Greek Anthology:

Now let me contrast one of the well-known poems by Rossetti, “The Woodspurge,” with a Hokku poem by Basho. “In moments of intense sorrow or grief,” Lafcadio Hearn was wont to repeat in his class-room, “when all the energies are paralysed, all the mental faculties being stricken into inaction, any new or strange thing, however small, seen accidentally, will be