And thee allure no verdant blooms That with fresh joy suspire; But blossoms touched with coming glooms, And weariness, and spent desire, Draw to thy spirit nigher.
Wherefore is nothing in thy sight Propitious save it be Brushed with the wings of hovering night, Worn with the shadow of delight, Sad with satiety.
For thou hast enmity toward all The servants of life's breath; One mistress holdeth thee in thrall, And them thou lovest who her call Answer; and she is Death.
Now Death thy ruined city's streets Walketh, a grisly queen. And there her sacred horror greets Him who invades these waste retreats, Her sacrosanct demesne--
In robes like clouds at sunset rolled About the dying sun, In splendid vestments of purple and gold That a thousand perished years have spun For her, the Imperial One.
Utamaro, the central and in some ways the most fascinating figure of this period, has been from the first a great favourite in the esteem of European collectors. His graceful, sinuous women are the images that come most readily to the minds of many people at the mention of Japanese prints. In his own time and land his popularity was equalled by that of no other artist.
It was by his portraits of women that Utamaro won his great fame. Passing outside the influence of Kiyonaga, he developed in his designs of the last decade of the nineteenth century his characteristic feminine type. Her strange and languid beauty, the drooping lines of her robes, her unnatural slenderness and willowiness, are the emanations of Utamaro's feverish mind; as her creator he ranks as the most brilliant, the most sophisticated, and the most poetical designer of his time. His life was spent in alternation between his workshop and the haunts of the Yoshiwara, whose beautiful inhabitants he immortalized in prints that are the ultimate expression of the mortal body's longing for a more than mortal perfection of happiness. Wearied of every common pleasure, he created these visions in whose disembodied, morbid loveliness his overwrought desires found consolation.
[Illustration: UTAMARO: OKITA OF NANIWAYA, A TEA-HOUSE WAITRESS.
Mica background. Size 12½ × 9. Signed _Utamaro, hitsu_. Chandler Collection.
Utamaro was born in 1753 in the province of Musachi. Early in life he went to Yedo and there studied under the noted Kano painter and book-illustrator Toriyama Sekiyen, whom some authorities say was his father. Almost from the beginning of his career he lived with the famous publisher Tsutaya, who issued his prints; and this relation continued up to the date of Tsutaya's death in 1797.