Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/69

Rh thought even sacred; it began to assume the most necessary rôle at a wedding ceremony. With the singing of a passage from “Takasago,” it is believed your wedlock will be sealed. “Takasago,” the happy play celebrating constancy, endurance, health and longevity, is represented by an old man and an old woman busy in the work of raking up the pine-needles under the pine-trees. The passage says: “True it is that these pine-trees shed not all their leaves; their verdure remains fresh for ages long; even among evergreen trees–the emblems of unchangeableness–exalted is their fame to the end of time–the fame of the two pine-trees that have grown old together.” What are these two pine-trees? Who are the old man and woman? The ghosts of the trees are nothing, but the old man and woman singing the age of golden and happy life. Among some three hundred plays now in existence, there is no other like “The Robe of Feathers” that gracefully carries the delicate, statuesque beauty of composition and sentiment. It is the play of a fairy whose feather-robe was stolen by a fisherman at Mio’s pine-clad shore, while she was bathing, and was finally given back upon her promise to dance. Not to go to extremes, even in sadness, is taught in Japan to be the height of cultured manners; here we have every Oriental beauty and lamentation in the song of this fairy who could not fly back to the sky: