Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/40

Or again in the following by the same author, Buson Yosano (1716–1783):

“Kindachi ni
Kitsune bake tari
Yoi no Haru.”

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Such brevity of poetical form might be well compared with an eight-coloured butterfly or a white dew upon summer grasses; again, with a tiny star carrying the whole large sky at its back. When I say that the Hokku poet’s chief aim is to impress the readers with the high atmosphere in which he is living, I mean that the readers also should be those living in an equally high poetical atmosphere; such readers’ minds will certainly respond to the wistfulness and delicacy of the Hokku, a wistfulness and delicacy not to be met with in the general run of English poetry.

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   “Kindachi ni
   Kitsune bake tari
   Yoi no Haru.”

   Prince young, gallant, a masquerading fox goes this spring eve.

   You must have seen somewhere a humorous Japanese sketch in which a fantastic young prince wearing a hunting dress of potato leaves (why, he is a masquerading fox; see his tail, which assumes the place of a back-sword), and having his hair dressed with two or three wheat-straws after an old fashion, is lightly drawn under the new moon of a spring eve; the evening in Japan’s April or May, rich, misty, perhaps at Kyoto, has such charm to make the mind of a fox beautifully unbalanced. Buson’s love of an irresistibly pretty gesticulation of life and nature lets him excel in such a subject as a spring night, whose soul is that of poetry.