(5) Hototogisu
(7) Nakitsuru kata wo
(5) Nagamureba—
(7) Tada ari-ake no
(7) Tsuki zo nokoreni[1]
that is, literally rendered,
"When I gaze towards the place where the cuckoo has been singing, nought remains but the moon in the early dawn."—Such is the narrow circle within which the poets of Japan have elected to move.
The favourite subjects of the Japanese muse are the flowers, the birds, the snow, the moon, the falling leaves in autumn, the mist on the mountains, in fact, the outward aspect of nature,—love of course, and the shortness of human life. Many of our Western commonplaces are conspicuously absent: no Japanese poet has expatiated on the beauties of sunset or starlight, or has penned sonnets to his mistress's eyebrows, or even so much as alluded to her eyes; much less would he be so improper as to hint at kissing her. Japanese poetry has commonplaces of its own, however; and rules from which there is no appeal prescribe the manner in which each subject is to be treated. One rule of general application in the odes forbids the employment of Chinese words,—a circumstance which narrowly limits the range of thought and expression, seeing that more than half the words in the language, and nearly all those denoting abstractions and delicate shades of meaning, are of Chinese origin.
Many Japanese odes are mere exclamations,—words outlining a picture for the imagination, not making any assertion for the logical intellect. Take, for instance, the following, written by an anonymous poet a thousand years ago:
- ↑ Some critic, very learned in everything but Japanese, will perhaps say that the first and fifth, and the second and fourth lines of this little poem do rhyme together, after all. We would remind him that rhyme is the intentional likeness of sound, not an accidental likeness, and that such accidental concurrences are not to be prevented in a language which, like Japanese, has but six finals, namely, the five vowels, a, e, i, o, u, and the consonant n. No rhyme is perceived in any such cases by the Japanese themselves, nor is it easy at first to get them to appreciate our European rhymes, or even to hear them.
