Changed is my childhood’s home--all but those insect-voices:
I think they are trying to speak of happier days that were.
These trembling dews on the grass--are they tears for the death of
autumn?--
Tears of the insect-singers that now so sadly cry?
It might be thought that several of the poems above given were intended
to express either a real or an affected sympathy with imagined
insect-pain. But this would be a wrong interpretation. In most
compositions of this class, the artistic purpose is to suggest, by
indirect means, various phases of the emotion of love,--especially that
melancholy which lends its own passional tone to the aspects and the
voices of nature. The baroque fancy that dew might be insect-tears,
is by its very exaggeration intended to indicate the extravagance of
grief, as well as to suggest that human tears have been freshly shed.
The verses in which a woman declares that her heart has become too
affectionate, since she cannot but feel for the bell-insect during a
heavy shower, really bespeak the fond anxiety felt for some absent
beloved, travelling in the time of the great rains. Again, in the
lines about “treading on insect-voices,” the dainty scruple is uttered
only as a hint of that intensification of feminine tenderness which
love creates. And a still more remarkable example of this indirect
double-suggestiveness is offered by the little poem prefacing this
article,--
“O insect, insect!--think you that Karma can be exhausted by song?”
The Western reader would probably suppose that the insect-condition,
or insect-state-of-being, is here referred to; but the real thought of
the speaker, presumably a woman, is that her own sorrow is the result
of faults committed in former lives, and is therefore impossible to
alleviate.
It will have been observed that a majority of the verses cited refer to
autumn and to the sensations of autumn. Certainly Japanese poets have
not been insensible to the real melancholy inspired by autumn,--that
vague strange annual revival of ancestral pain: dim inherited sorrow
of millions of memories associated through millions of years with the
death of summer;--but in nearly every utterance of this melancholy, the
veritable allusion is to grief of parting. With its color-changes, its
leaf-whirlings, and the ghostly plaint of its insect-voices, autumn
Buddhistically symbolizes impermanency, the certainty of bereavement,
the pain that clings to all desire, and the sadness of isolation.
* * * * *
But even if these poems on insects were primarily intended to shadow
amorous emotion, do they not reflect also for us the subtlest influences
of nature,--wild pure nature,--upon imagination and memory? Does not
the place accorded to insect-melody, in the home-life as well as in
the literature of Japan, prove an æsthetic sensibility developed in
directions that yet remain for us almost unexplored? Does not the
shrilling booth of the insect-seller at a night-festival proclaim even
a popular and universal comprehension of things divined in the West
only by our rarest poets:--the pleasure-pain of autumn’s beauty, the
weird sweetness of the voices of the night, the magical quickening of
remembrance by echoes of forest and field? Surely we have something
to learn from the people in whose mind the simple chant of a cricket
can awaken whole fairy-swarms of tender and delicate fancies. We may
boast of being their masters in the mechanical,--their teachers of the
artificial in all its varieties of ugliness;--but in the knowledge of
the natural,--in the feeling of the joy and beauty of earth,--they
exceed us like the Greeks of old. Yet perhaps it will be only when
our blind aggressive industrialism has wasted and sterilized their
paradise,--substituting everywhere for beauty the utilitarian, the
conventional, the vulgar, the utterly hideous,--that we shall begin
with remorseful amazement to comprehend the charm of that which we
destroyed.