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OLD JAPANESE DRAMAS
As time went on, the young warrior fell to writing on a tanzaku[1], and passed it to his friend, who read from it the following poem [2]:
"On yonder arch that spans the stream,
Where festive throngs pass to and fro,
Sweet must it be to feel, I deem,
The cool and gentle breezes blow."
The poem seemed to make a strong appeal to the imagination of the shaveling. Time and again he ran his eye over it before putting the paper down on the bench at his side. Then suddenly a vagrant puff of wind caught and carried it off. For a moment it floated in air, then fluttered down into a pleasure-boat that lay moored to the shore.
The samurai in question bore the name of
- ↑ A tanzaku is an artistically prepared strip of moderately heavy paper, about two inches wide and twelve inches long, designed for the inditing of a short poem, or for the painting of a picture. A man of taste often takes a few of these strips with him, when visiting places noted for flowers or fireflies, and writes on them versicles of 31 or 17 syllables, composed on the spur of the moment, when the imagination is excited by sights of beauty.
- ↑ The original is trite in thought as may be inferred from this rendering, but the poem may justly be looked on as noteworthy, in that it is a very clever imitation, in similarity of diction and phrasing and of construction generally, of a famous poem in the Kokinshū, or "Poems, Ancient and Modern" (an anthology compiled in A.D. 905 at the mandate of the Emperor Daigo).
