My heart to body Fuel to engine; Thy heart an air-ship Loose in the sky.
Here the similes are plain and forcible. The next poem is less lucid:
Borne in no road-car, Endless the railway, How shall poor I reach Station at last?
Literally: “Riding in no vehicle (which is used for a short journey), the train whithersoever going (for an indefinite distance), by doing what shall this body of mine, Terminus?” That is: My love is not a short-lived fancy, but a lifelong passion, until I reach the terminus of death. Graceful, indeed, but scarcely gracious is a lady’s reply to an admirer who had sent her his photograph:
Only your likeness! Faithful? I know not. Could I but take one, Too, of your heart!
The double meaning of a “faithful” likeness and a “faithful” lover can, for once, be preserved in English. A pun on the word _tokeru_, which means “to melt” and “to be undone,” is allied with a dainty antithesis in
White snow of Fuji Loosened at sunrise; Maiden’s _shimada_ Loosened for sleep.
The _shimada_ is perhaps the most elaborate, and certainly the most elegant, way of dressing the hair. It is generally adopted by geisha and young married women, dividing favour with the _chōchō_ or butterfly coiffure. Respect for age is counselled in a rather pathetic protest by an old woman, who recalls her faded beauty in a conventional image. Nightingales and plum-trees are always associated in Japanese minds.
Mock not the puckered Bloom of a dried plum; Once on its fresh spray Nightingales wept.
The _umeboshi_, a plum pickled in salt and _shiso_ and afterwards dried, is as happily descriptive of the wizened monkey face of a Japanese crone as the peach of an Anglo-Saxon lassie’s complexion. It will be seen that serio-comic touches of self-depreciation, like the old lady’s frank comparison of faded bloom to dried fruit, do not jar on the Japanese. Sincerity--genuine feeling and just appreciation--is at the root of their poetic impulse. Why should a disappointed girl shrink from whispering her secret to the reeds of anonymous minstrelsy?
As vine weds ivy, So would I clasp him; If the man will not, What can be done?
[Illustration: Jealousy exorcised from Aoi-no-Uye. (Nō).]
From the foregoing thirty Dodoitsu the reader can form a not inadequate opinion of “ditties sung by singing-girls to the twanging of the guitar.” That accidental glamour, which constitutes style and makes of one word a queen, of another a beggar-maid, through vicissitudes of usage, does not emanate from one of them. They are marred for a native ear by domestic and colloquial idiom, “soiled by all ignoble use”; they treat too often of sexual sentiment, which our literary verse parades to satiety, and which theirs rather shrouds in dignified silence. No doubt you will find among Tanka and Haikai more ingenuity of thought, more dexterity of pen. But, putting that aside, the Dodoitsu has more interest for a humanist, since its range of feeling is wider. Just as the street-scenes of Hokusai and the love-scenes of Utamaro afford more humane pleasure than the purely artistic studies of their academic precursors, so we are less allured by “A Fan in my Lady’s Chamber,” by “A Distant View of a Fishing Boat,” by “Hoar-frost on the Bamboos,” than by the artless outcries of else inarticulate nature. The blue-stocking at court, who finds it so easy to turn a polished compliment, is more remote from our hearts than her humble sister, doing rough work in the rice-field. The sorrows of wife and maid, the joy of flowers and laughter--these inspire in us deeper sympathy than the experimental literature of dilettante dames. There is often a crude spontaneity in the non-literary poem which is more pleasing than a recondite conceit. But, however crude the expression may be, it yet owes something to form. The poet is obliged to satisfy the easy metrical conditions which regulate the structure of a Dodoitsu, thus ensuring a neat circlet for a single gem, whether it be paste or diamond. How clumsy a Japanese song can become, when the Muse has forgotten her corset, may be seen by the following effusion: