Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/49

Rh poets at their best, as in the case of some work of William Blake, are the poets of attitude who depend so much on the intelligent sympathy of their readers. Their work is like a silent bell of a Buddhist temple; it may not mean anything for some people, like that bell which has no voice at all. But the bell rings out, list, in golden voice, when there is a person who strikes it; and what voice the bell should have will depend on the other. And again the Hokku poem is a bell helpless, silent, when with no reader to cooperate; when I say that the readers of Japanese poetry, particularly this Hokku poem, should be born like a poet, I count, I should say, their personal interest almost as much as that of the writers themselves. Therefore in our poetry the readers assume an equally responsible place; and they can become, if they like, creators of poems which in fact are not their own work, just as if one with a bell-hammer did create the bell in the real sense. We have one very famous Hokku in the following:

I should like, to begin with, to ask the Western readers what impression they would ever have