“Shikishima no Yamato-gokoro wo Hito towaba, Asahi ni niou Yama zakura bana.”
Heart of our Island, Heart of Yamato, If one should ask you What it may be; Fragrance is wafted Through morning sunlight Over the mountain, Cherry-trees bloom.
But the Hokku or Haikai, which dates from the fifteenth century, imprisons the soul of wit in a cell of even briefer dimensions. It gives the Tanka fourteen syllables start, and covers the course in three strides of five, seven, and five. The pace is so swift that it almost always requires an exegetic field-glass (a microscope and a race of animalcula were perhaps a fitter comparison) to estimate the astonishing triumphs of this wee Pegasus. One of the winners established this remarkable record:
“Asagao ni Tsurube torarete, Morai mizu.”
The naked eye perceives in this, indistinctly--
By convolvulus Well bucket taken: Gift-water.
Mr. B. H. Chamberlain’s powerful glasses reveal the merit and the secret of this achievement so clearly that I borrow them for the readers use. “The poetess Chiyo,” it appears, “having gone to her well one morning to draw water, found that some tendrils of convolvulus had twined themselves round the rope. As a poetess and a woman of taste, she could not bring herself to disturb the dainty blossoms. So, leaving her own well to the convolvuli, she went out and begged water of a neighbour.” Both Tanka and Haikai may enter for the prizes of polite literature, but the Dodoitsu, being reserved for vulgar songs, is “despised by all well-bred persons.” As reasonably might the plebeian “moke” of ’Enery ’Awkins aspire to run at Ascot or Goodwood, as the Dodoitsu be classed with Haikai and Tanka! Culture ignores it; society excludes it from the list of intellectual amusements. Yet its inferiority is sometimes more apparent than real. The metre is a happy medium between the two aristocratic favourites, since it consists of four lines, containing twenty-six syllables in all; three lines of seven syllables are clenched by a finale of five. It very often enshrines a sweet fancy, a delicate image, a chiselled exclamation of grief, or faith, or roguery. The nearest analogue to all three would be the epigram, were it not that the Oriental poet frequently aims at nothing more than a pictorial flash; a landscape seen by lightning, a life divined by instinct; a momentary miniature, not a condensed conclusion. I can think of but one English poem which partially follows the same method, Robert Browning’s “Apparitions”: