[Decoration]
THIS New Year's morning I find upon my table two most welcome gifts from
a young poet of my literary class. One is a roll of cloth for a new
kimono,--cloth such as my Western reader never saw. The brown warp is
cotton thread; but the woof is soft white paper string, irregularly
speckled with black. When closely examined, the black specklings prove
to be Chinese and Japanese characters;--for the paper woof is made out
of manuscript,--manuscript of poems,--which has been deftly twisted into
fine cord, with the written surface outwards. The general effect of the
white, black, and brown in the texture is a warm mouse-grey. In many
Izumo homes a similar kind of cloth is manufactured for family use; but
this piece was woven especially for me by the mother of my pupil. It
will make a most comfortable winter-robe; and when wearing it, I shall
be literally clothed with poetry,--even as a divinity might be clothed
with the sun.
The other gift is poetry also, but poetry in the original state: a
wonderful manuscript collection of Japanese songs gathered from
unfamiliar sources, and particularly interesting from the fact that
nearly all of them are furnished with refrains. There are hundreds of
compositions, old and new,--including several extraordinary ballads,
many dancing-songs, and a surprising variety of love-songs. Neither in
sentiment nor in construction do any of these resemble the Japanese
poetry of which I have already, in previous books, offered specimens in
translation. The forms are, in most cases, curiously irregular; but
their irregularity is not without a strange charm of its own.
* * * * *
I am going to offer examples of these compositions,--partly because of
their unfamiliar emotional quality, and partly because I think that
something can be learned from their strange art of construction, The
older songs--selected from the antique drama--seem to me particularly
worthy of notice. The thought or feeling and its utterance are
supremely simple; yet by primitive devices of reiteration and of pause,
very remarkable results have been obtained. What strikes me especially
noteworthy in the following specimen is the way that the phrase, begun
with the third line of the first stanza, and interrupted by a kind of
burthen, is repeated and finished in the next stanza. Perhaps the
suspension will recall to Western readers the effect of some English
ballads with double refrains, or of such quaint forms of French song as
the famous--
Au jardin de mon pere--
_Vole, mon coeur, vole!_
Il y a un pommier doux,
_Tout doux!_
But in the Japanese song the reiteration of the broken phrase produces a
slow dreamy effect as unlike the effect of the French composition as the
movements of a Japanese dance are unlike those of any Western round:--