Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/55

Rh real Hokku, at least in my mind, are a running living water of poetry where you can reflect yourself to find your own identification. (Therefore the best Hokku poem is least translatable in English or perhaps in any language.) It is, as I wrote already somewhere, “like a dew upon lotus-leaves of green, or under maple-leaves of red, which, though it is nothing but a trifling drop of water, shines, glitters, and sparkles now pearl-white, then amethyst-blue, again ruby-red, according to the time of day and situation; better still to say this Hokku is like a spider-thread laden with the white summer dews, swaying among the branches of a tree like an often invisible ghost in the air, on the perfect balance; that sway indeed, not the thread itself, is the beauty of our seventeen-syllable poem.”

But you must know that such language can only apply to the very best Hokku, which, when introduced with sympathy rather than mere intelligence, will serve, through their magic of potential speech, using Arthur Ransome’s phrase, or, let me say, potential effect, the modern Western writers or poets, as I said before, in search of an escape from the so-called literature; and these very best Hokku poems cannot be, in my opinion, more than half a thousand, nay, perhaps not more than two hundred and fifty in number from all works written in the last three hundred years. As there are indeed a most