was not yet reached. A favourite game at these tournaments, called Renga, wherein one person composes the second hemistich of a verse and another person has to provide it with a first hemistich, seems to date from the eleventh century. Out of this, at a later date, by the dropping of the second hemistich, grew the Haikai or Hokku, an ultra-Lilliputian class of poem having but seventeen syllables (5, 7, 5). Here are a couple of specimens:
|
Rakkwa eda ni |
"What I saw as a fallen blossom | |
|
Yūdachi ya |
"A shower, and head-gear variously |
this latter a vignette of the scattering caused by an unexpected shower, when one, maybe, will hold up a fan, another don a kerchief, etc., to get as little wet as possible.—Millions of these tiny dashes of colour or humour have been considered worthy of preservation. In fact, the votaries of the Hokku claim, not without justice, that, though but half the length of the classic ode, it is wider in scope, as no theme however unconventional is excluded by its rules, neither does it lay half the dictionary under a ban.
The nearest European parallel to the Japanese poems of thirty-one or seventeen syllables is the epigram, using that term in its earlier sense. Or we might say of the seventeen-syllable poems in particular, that they correspond to such prominent half-stanzas as
"The linnet born within the cage,
That never knew the summer woods,"
or
"And Autumn laying here and there
A fiery finger on the leaves,"
which, in the hands of our poets, are evolved as parts of members of a complex organic whole, but would in Japanese literature each stand alone as an independent composition. Naturally the
- ↑ This line may seem to have but four syllables. There are, however, five in writing, and even to a Japanese ear in pronunciation, as the long syllable chō counts double.
