[Decoration]
... Life ere long
Came on me in the public ways, and bent
Eyes deeper than of old: Death met I too,
And saw the dawn glow through.
--GEORGE MEREDITH
[Illustration: PLATE I.
1-2, _Young Semi_.
3-4, _Haru-Zemi_, also called _Nawashiro-Zemi_.]
Semi
(CICADAE)
[Decoration]
Koe ni mina
Naki-shimote ya--
Semi no kara!
--_Japanese Love-Song_
The voice having been all consumed by crying, there remains only
the shell of the _semi!_
I
A CELEBRATED Chinese scholar, known in Japanese literature as Riku-Un,
wrote the following quaint account of the Five Virtues of the Cicada:--
"I.--The Cicada has upon its head certain figures or signs.[26]
These represent its [written] characters, style, literature.
[26] The curious markings on the head of one variety of
Japanese _semi_ are believed to be characters which
are names of souls.
"II.--It eats nothing belonging to earth, and drinks only dew.
This proves its cleanliness, purity, propriety.
"III.--It always appears at a certain fixed time. This proves
its fidelity, sincerity, truthfulness.
"IV.--It will not accept wheat or rice. This proves its probity,
uprightness, honesty.
"V.--It does not make for itself any nest to live in. This
proves its frugality, thrift, economy."
* * * * *
We might compare this with the beautiful address of Anacreon to the
cicada, written twenty-four hundred years ago: on more than one point
the Greek poet and the Chinese sage are in perfect accord:--
"_We deem thee happy, O Cicada, because, having drunk, like a
king, only a little dew, thou dost chirrup on the tops of trees.
For all things whatsoever that thou seest in the fields are
thine, and whatsoever the seasons bring forth. Yet art thou
the friend of the tillers of the land,--from no one harmfully
taking aught. By mortals thou art held in honor as the pleasant
harbinger of summer; and the Muses love thee. Phoebus himself
loves thee, and has given thee a shrill song. And old age does
not consume thee. O thou gifted one,--earth-born, song-loving,
free from pain, having flesh without blood,--thou art nearly
equal to the Gods!_"[27]
[27] In this and other citations from the Greek
anthology, I have depended upon Burges'
translation.
And we must certainly go back to the old Greek literature in order to
find a poetry comparable to that of the Japanese on the subject of
musical insects. Perhaps of Greek verses on the cricket, the most
beautiful are the lines of Meleager: "_O cricket, the soother of slumber
... weaving the thread of a voice that causes love to wander away!_" ...
There are Japanese poems scarcely less delicate in sentiment on the
chirruping of night-crickets; and Meleager's promise to reward the
little singer with gifts of fresh leek, and with "drops of dew cut up
small," sounds strangely Japanese. Then the poem attributed to Anyte,
about the little girl Myro making a tomb for her pet cicada and
cricket, and weeping because Hades, "hard to be persuaded," had taken
her playthings away, represents an experience familiar to Japanese
child-life. I suppose that little Myro--(how freshly her tears still
glisten, after seven and twenty centuries!)--prepared that "common tomb"
for her pets much as the little maid of Nippon would do to-day, putting
a small stone on top to serve for a monument. But the wiser Japanese
Myro would repeat over the grave a certain Buddhist prayer.
It is especially in their poems upon the cicada that we find the old
Greeks confessing their love of insect-melody: witness the lines in the
Anthology about the tettix caught in a spider's snare, and "making
lament in the thin fetters" until freed by the poet;--and the verses by
Leonidas of Tarentum picturing the "unpaid minstrel to wayfaring men"
as "sitting upon lofty trees, warmed with the great heat of summer,
sipping the dew that is like woman's milk;"--and the dainty fragment of
Meleager, beginning: "_Thou vocal tettix, drunk with drops of dew,
sitting with thy serrated limbs upon the tops of petals, thou givest
out the melody of the lyre from thy dusky skin_." ... Or take the
charming address of Evenus to a nightingale:--
"_Thou Attic maiden, honey-fed, hast chirping seized a chirping
cicada, and bearest it to thy unfledged young,--thou, a twitterer,
the twitterer,--thou, the winged, the well-winged,--thou, a
stranger, the stranger,--thou, a summer-child, the summer-child!
Wilt thou not quickly cast it from thee? For it is not right, it
is not just, that those engaged in song should perish by the
mouths of those engaged in song._"
On the other hand, we find Japanese poets much more inclined to praise
the voices of night-crickets than those of semi. There are countless
poems about semi, but very few which commend their singing. Of course
the semi are very different from the cicadae known to the Greeks. Some
varieties are truly musical; but the majority are astonishingly
noisy,--so noisy that their stridulation is considered one of the great
afflictions of summer. Therefore it were vain to seek among the myriads
of Japanese verses on semi for anything comparable to the lines of
Evenus above quoted; indeed, the only Japanese poem that I could find on
the subject of a cicada caught by a bird, was the following:--
Ana kanashi!
Tobi ni toraruru
Semi no koe.
--RANSETSU.
Ah! how piteous the cry of the semi seized by the kite!
Or "caught by a boy" the poet might equally well have observed,--this
being a much more frequent cause of the pitiful cry. The lament of
Nicias for the tettix would serve as the elegy of many a semi:--
"_No more shall I delight myself by sending out a sound from my
quick-moving wings, because I have fallen into the savage hand
of a boy, who seized me unexpectedly, as I was sitting under the
green leaves._"
Here I may remark that Japanese children usually capture semi by means
of a long slender bamboo tipped with bird-lime (_mochi_). The sound made
by some kinds of semi when caught is really pitiful,--quite as pitiful
as the twitter of a terrified bird. One finds it difficult to persuade
oneself that the noise is not a _voice_ of anguish, in the human sense
of the word "voice," but the production of a specialized exterior
membrane. Recently, on hearing a captured semi thus scream, I became
convinced in quite a new way that the stridulatory apparatus of certain
insects must not be thought of as a kind of musical instrument, but
as an organ of speech, and that its utterances are as intimately
associated with simple forms of emotion, as are the notes of a
bird,--the extraordinary difference being that the insect has its vocal
chords _outside_. But the insect-world is altogether a world of goblins
and fairies: creatures with organs of which we cannot discover the use,
and senses of which we cannot imagine the nature;--creatures with
myriads of eyes, or with eyes in their backs, or with eyes moving about
at the ends of trunks and horns;--creatures with ears in their legs and
bellies, or with brains in their waists! If some of them happen to have
voices outside of their bodies instead of inside, the fact ought not to
surprise anybody.
* * * * *
I have not yet succeeded in finding any Japanese verses alluding to the
stridulatory apparatus of semi,--though I think it probable that such
verses exist. Certainly the Japanese have been for centuries familiar
with the peculiarities of their own singing insects. But I should not
now presume to say that their poets are incorrect in speaking of the
"voices" of crickets and of cicadae. The old Greek poets who actually
describe insects as producing music with their wings and feet,
nevertheless speak of the "voices," the "songs," and the "chirruping" of
such creatures,--just as the Japanese poets do. For example, Meleager
thus addresses the cricket:
"_O thou that art with shrill wings the self-formed imitation of
the lyre, chirrup me something pleasant while beating your vocal
wings with your feet!_ ..."