Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/47

Rh vague; a severe restraint imposed on one side will be well balanced by the large freedom on the other. As in any poem of any other country, the Japanese poet’s work also rests on the belief that poetry should express truth in its own way; by that truth we Japanese mean Nature; again by that Nature the order of spontaneity. Lao Tze says: “Man takes his law from the earth; the Earth its law from Heaven; Heaven its law from Tao; but the law of Tao in its own spontaneity.” It was the Chinese sage’s greatness to interpret, you might say, psychologically God by the single word of spontaneity. When I measure our Japanese poetical truth by the said spontaneity, my mind dwells on the best Hokku poems as the songs “with no word, not tyrannised by form,” on which I wrote as follows:

They are the voice of spontaneity which makes an unexpected assault upon Poetry’s summit; the best expression for it would be, of course, suggestion or hint of its eccentricity or emphasis. As the so-called literary expression is a secondary matter in the realm of poetry, there is no strict boundary between the domains generally called