on the sleepy back of a horse by a whispering stream, then seeing the fallen petals in deep sigh with country rustics, is proof enough that he regarded a city life as fatal to his poetry; he was, with Whitman, a good exemplar to teach us how to escape the burden of life; and again the Hokku poems, if intelligently translated into English (indeed that is an almost impossible literary feat to accomplish), will give the most interesting example to encourage the modern literary ideal of the West which seeks its salvation in escape from the so-called literary.
My literary mind of Hokku love often finds itself highly pleased, as if when a somewhat familiar face is disclosed out of the crowd under a strange flash of light, to discover a Hokku touch in English poetry in my casual reading of my beloved poet’s pages; I will call Landor a Hokku poet when he wrote the following:
“I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.”
This poetical atmosphere is the atmosphere in which Buson wrote, as I mentioned before,
“Osoki hi no
Tsumorite toki
Mukashi kana.”
which might be translated as follows:
“Slow-passing days
Gathered, gathering,–
Alas, past far-away, distant!”
