Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/50

46 from their reading of the above; I will never be surprised if it may sound to them to be merely a musician’s alphabet; besides, the thought of a frog is even absurd for a poetical subject. But when the Japanese mind turns it into high poetry (it is said that Basho the author instantly awoke to a knowledge of the true road his own poetry should tread with this frog poem; it has been regarded in some quarters as a thing almost sacred although its dignity is a little fallen of late), it is because it draws at once a picture of an autumnal desolation reigning on an ancient temple pond whose world-old silence is now broken by a leaping frog. But a mind of philosophical turn, not merely a lover of description, would please to interpret it through the so-called mysticism of the Zen sect Buddhism. Basho is supposed to awaken into enlightenment now when he heard the voice bursting out of voicelessness, and the conception that life and death were mere change of condition was deepened into faith. It is true to say that nobody but the author himself will ever know the real meaning of the poem; which is the reason I say that each reader can become a creator of the poem by his own understanding as if he had written it himself.

Take the following poem by Buson:

Katamari ni Muchiutsu Ume no aruji kana.”