Yū-kage ya,
Nagare ni hitasu
Tombo no o!
The dragon-fly at dusk dips her tail into the running stream.
IV
The foregoing compositions are by old authors mostly: few modern hokku on the subject have the same naïve[1] quality of picturesqueness. The older poets seem to have watched the ways of the dragon-fly with a patience and a freshness of curiosity impossible to this busier generation. They made verses about all its habits and peculiarities,—even about such matters as the queer propensity[2] of the creature to return many times in succession to any spot once chosen for a perch. Sometimes they praised the beauty of its wings, and compared them to the wings[3] of devas or Buddhist angels; sometimes they celebrated the imponderable grace of its hovering,—the ghostly stillness and lightness of its motion; and sometimes they jested about its waspish appearance of anger, or about the goblin oddity of its stare. They noticed. the wonderful way in which
註
