Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/46

42 for all the rest of one’s life.” Rossetti has the following:

And Basho’s poem to which I invite your attention has the following:

Our Japanese Hokku master, the lone poet on a certain forgotten highway, found the beauty of the wistaria flowers most strikingly appealing to his poetic mind now simplified, therefore intensified, through the physical lassitude resulting from the whole day’s walk; if Basho had been a man of more specialised mind, in the modern sense, he might have taken notice of some forgotten flower with its peculiarity by his feet, when he rested himself on the bamboo porch of a country inn, perhaps facing the open garden where the evening silence already had begun to steal.

When I say the best Hokku poems do never know their own limitations, (remember, they are only seventeen syllables), that is because they are of the most essential of all the essential languages, which is inwardly extensive and