Japanese poetry

“ The Japanese artist will draw a woman as if she were a lily, a man as if he were a tempest, a tree as if it were a writhing snake, a mountain as if it were a towering giant. This is the very essence of poetical imagination; and the result of it is to endow a picture with obscure suggestions and overtones of infinite power. Symbols of existence beyond themselves, these designs are charged with an almost mystical command upon the emotions of the spectator. Western art has employed such a method comparatively little in painting. In poetry it appears frequently. ”

“ Foreign form cannot be reproduced in Japanese any more than French can be produced into English. The value of foreign poetry is in what makes the soul, the heart, the heart of all poetry:—feeling and imagination. Foreign feeling and foreign imagination may help to add something to the beauty and the best quality of future Japanese poetry. There I think the worth of study may be very great. But when foreign poetry means nothing but correct verse, you might as well waste no time upon it; as there is much great poetry which has good form as well as strong feeling. ”

“ One of the earliest and most famous statements on Japanese poetry was made in 905 A.D. by Ki no Tsurayuki in his preface to the Collection of Ancient and Modern Poetry. This begins:
“Japanese poetry has for its seed the human heart, and grows into countless leaves of words. In this life many things touch men: they seek then to express their feelings by images drawn from what they see or hear. Who among men does not compose poetry on hearing the song of the nightingale among the flowers, or the cries of the frog who lives in the water? ”

“ It is far easier to describe what Japanese poetry is not than what it actually is. To begin with, there are no Japanese epics, such as the Iliad and Odyssey, the Kalevala, and the Mahabharata, and their phrase naga-uta ("long poetry") is to us a misnomer, for they have no really long poems. Philosophy, religion, satire are not themes for the Japanese poet; he even goes so far as to consider war no fit subject for a song. ”

“ It is not too much to say that an appreciative reader of poetry in Japan is not made, but born, just like a poet; as the Japanese poetry is never explanatory, one has everything before him on which to let his imagination freely play ”

“ One who lives, for instance, in Chicago or New York, can hardly know the real beauty of night and silence; it is my opinion that the Western character, particularly of Americans, would be sweetened, or at least toned down, if that part of the beauty of Nature might be emphasised. Oh, our Japanese life of dream and silence! The Japanese poetry is that of the moon, stars, and flowers, that of a bird and waterfall for the noisiest. ”

“ Still more foreign to their genius is the personification of abstract qualities. Abstract words are comparatively few, and it does not occur to the Japanese poet (or painter) to represent Truth, Justice, and Faith as comely damsels in flowing robes, or to make Love a chubby naked boy with wings and a bow and arrows. Muses, Graces, Virtues, Furies—in short, the host of personifications without which Western poetry would be only a shadow of itself—have little counterpart in Japanese literature. ”

“ For dramatic poetry we have to wait until the fourteenth century. Even then there are no complete dramatic poems, but only dramas containing a certain poetical element.
Japanese poetry is, in short, confined to lyrics, and what, for want of a better word, may be called epigrams. It is primarily an expression of emotion. We have amatory verse, poems of longing for home and absent dear ones, praise of love and wine, elegies on the dead, laments over the uncertainty of life. A chief place is given to the beauties of external nature. ”

“ The real poet in the Japanese understanding is primitive, as primitive are the moon and flowers; the voice of a wind we hear to-day is the same voice which echoed, let me say, to the ears of Adam and Eve through the valley and trees. ”

“ Japanese literature of the old régime was written partly in classical Chinese, partly in pure Japanese, and comprised mostly mythology, history, law, poetry, romance, drama, and Buddhist and Confucian philosophy. As we cannot go into details on this subject, so tempting, we shall confine ourselves to a few comments on Japanese poetry, which is more original and less Chinese than prose. The Japanese are very much addicted to writing poetry; like Silas Wegg, they drop off into poetry on every possible occasion. ”

“ Fighting and bloodshed are apparently not considered fit themes for poetry.
It is not only in its form and subject-matter that Japanese poetry is limited in its scope. The modern poet of Europe makes free use of the works of the Greek and Roman poets as models and as storehouses of poetic imagery. ”

“ Besides, to sing the stars and the flowers in Japan means to sing Life, since we human beings are not merely a part of Nature, but Nature itself. When our Japanese poetry is best, it is, let me say, a searchlight or flash of thought or passion cast on a moment of Life and Nature, which, by virtue of its intensity, leads us to the conception of the whole ”

“ When our modern young poets cry to go back to the age of their forefathers, they think that it is only the way to escape from the so-called literature and gain this poetical strength and beauty; it is their opinion that they find all the Western literary ideals in our Japanese ancient life and poetry. But I often quarrelled with them on the point that the real poetry of any country should be an expression of beauty and truth; we must build, I always insist, our poetry on our own true culture, which we formed through the pain and patience of centuries. ”

“ To their minds things happen, rather than are done; the tides of fate are far more real to them than the strong will and the endeavour which wrestles with them. The significance of this fact in regard to the moral and psychological development of these races may be left to others to determine. It is sufficient here to note its influence on the literature, and especially on the poetry.
Some rhetorical devices which are peculiar to Japanese poetry require a brief notice. ”

“ After long years of internal warfare, the establishment of peace at the beginning of the century had led to a period of great prosperity and a brilliant flowering of the arts. It was natural that Japanese poetry, which had hitherto been marked chiefly by its sobriety and restraint, should become more cheerful and extravagant, and that the shift of the centre of creative activity from the court to the haunts of merchants should be reflected also in the tone. ”

“ Educated persons accept all such literary dicta without question. European notions may be all very well in such matters as railways, and drainage, and steam-boilers, and things of that sort; but when it comes to poetry, the Japanese cry halt, for this is sacred ground. There are, no doubt, some heretics in these latter days:—one programme shown to us proposes such themes as "A Torpedo-boat," "The Yearly House-cleaning," "Lucifer Matches." (!) A few men have even endeavoured to lead Japanese poetry into completely new paths,—to introduce rhyme, with stanzas formed on the English model, etc. ”

“ There is a full repertory of Japanese love-poetry, whether protestations of passion, aubades by parting lovers, laments over faithlessness, or any of the other possibilities in so highly developed a medium. The importance of poetry as a go-between in love-affairs arose from the to us rather strange manner of courtship of the Japanese aristocracy in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, when the techniques of their poetry were being formulated. ”

“ Is it not from its power of invoking from the recesses of the heart feelings and experiences to which the painter or sculptor can appeal only by accidental association? In Japan, however, poetry has so constantly and faithfully drawn its inspiration from nature's images, and has been so loyally content to limit itself to appreciated interpretations of their suggestions, that mere mention of a particular combination of natural beauties summons to Japanese sight a picture of concrete loveliness and to the Japanese mind a poem of abstract ideas. ”

“ The selection which I have made should prove interesting, not merely because it will introduce the reader to a class of Japanese poetry about which little or nothing has yet been written in English, but much more because it will afford some glimpses of a supernatural world which still remains for the most part unexplored. Without knowledge of Far Eastern superstitions and folk-tales, no real understanding of Japanese fiction or drama or poetry will ever become possible. ”

“ Because the Japanese have failed in the past to produce literature equal to the best of Western lands, we are not justified in asserting that she never will and that she is inherently deficient in literary imagination. In regard to certain forms of light fancy, all admit that Japanese poems are unsurpassed by those of other lands. Japanese amative poetry is noted for its delicate fancies and plays on words exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, of translation, or even of expression, to one unacquainted with the language. ”

“ They do not believe in "smothering the soul with many words."
Perhaps what strikes one most in connection with the classic verses is the dates at which they were written, for many that have come down to us were composed a thousand years ago. Indeed, Japanese poetry is older than Japanese history, and tradition says that there were many versifiers even in the days of the mythological Emperor, Jimmu Tenno. At any rate, Japan had a literature of its own long before the Northmen found America!
In the old days only nobles, Court officials and church dignitaries wrote poetry. ”

“ The mention of a Japanese poem gives me an opportunity to say something about Japanese poetry. Like other early people, our forefathers in archaic time liked to express their thoughts in a measured form of language. The whole structure of the tongue being naturally melodious, on account of its consisting of open syllables with clear and sonorous vowels and little of the harsh consonantal elements in them, the number of syllables in a line has been almost the only feature that distinguished our poetry from ordinary prose composition. ”

“ We have learned, and experience has trained our senses to instant perception, that things have the third dimension, that of thickness, and are not equally near or far. The Japanese, with an instinct beyond that of some of his Mongolian neighbors, avoids an extreme flat treatment by confining himself largely to the essential lines of objects, allowing one's imagination to supply the rest. He carries suggestiveness, the poet's and the artist's effective ally, to the utmost. ”

“ In the Japanese poetical language all the vowels are of the same length, so that quantity, such as we find in the poetry of Greece and Rome, is unknown. Nor is there any regular succession of accented and unaccented syllables as in the poetry of modern Europe, the Japanese laying hardly any greater stress on one part of a word than on another. In short, the only thing in the mechanism of Japanese poetry which distinguishes it from prose is the alternation of phrases of five and seven syllables each. It is, in fact, a species of blank verse. ”

“ Perhaps those pieces which reflect the ideas of preëxistence and of future rebirths will prove especially interesting to the Western reader,—much less because of poetical worth than because of comparative novelty. We have very little English verse of any class containing fancies of this kind; but they swarm in Japanese poetry even as commonplaces and conventionalisms. ”

“ A bird perched on a branch of a tree, a few flowers grouped together with exquisite relation of colours, and such like subjects are those which they love to display. The Japanese painter commends himself to us by the delicacy of his execution and the harmonious blending of his colours. He knows the exact science by tradition, he has learnt the law of contrasts and that of complementaries, but of the poetry, the emotion of colour, he is generally ignorant. He applies mechanically the rules he has had handed down to him without ever attempting to emancipate himself from the mechanical process. ”

“ It is the aim of this Japanese poetry that each line of the poem should appeal to the reader’s consciousness, perhaps with the unconnected words, touching and again kindling on the particular association; there is ample reason to say that our poetry is really searching for a far more elusive effect than the general English poetry. ”

“ The very essence of poetry is in it, to the Japanese mind, and they never weary of making delicate little verses on the subject, suggesting at least—for that, to them, is more desirable than expressing—the evanescent loveliness of life, and its eternity. ”

“ In another lecture I spoke as sincerely as I could of the very high merit in the epigrammatic forms of Japanese poetry. These brief forms of poetry have been developed in Japan to perfection not equalled elsewhere in modern poetry, perhaps not surpassed, in some respects, even by Greek poetry of the same kind. But there can be no doubt of this fact, that a national literature requires many other forms of expression [253] than the epigrammatic form. Nothing that is good should ever be despised or cast aside ”

“ It takes a foreigner, whose ears have been sealed by fate to the siren-voices of an alien literature, to make such discoveries as this, to discern poetry where literature is woefully wanting. Therefore I am not in the least disconcerted to learn that the Japanese "common people have songs of their own... despised by all well-bred persons," but which illustrate for me this familiar phenomenon of non-literary poetry. ”