Fireflies have been celebrated in Japanese poetry from ancient time;
and frequent mention of them is made in early classical prose. One
of the fifty-four chapters of the famous novel, _Genji-Monogari_,
for example,--written either toward the close of the tenth century
or at the beginning of the eleventh,--is entitled, "Fireflies"; and
the author relates how a certain noble person was enabled to obtain
one glimpse of a lady's face in the dark by the device of catching
and suddenly liberating a number of fireflies. The first literary
interest in fireflies may have been stimulated, if not aroused, by
the study of Chinese poetry. Even to-day every Japanese child knows a
little song about the famous Chinese scholar who, in the time of his
struggles with poverty, studied by the light of a paper bag filled with
fireflies. But, whatever the original source of their inspiration,
Japanese poets have been making verses about fireflies during more than
a thousand years. Compositions on the subject can be found in every
form of Japanese poetry; but the greater number of firefly poems are in
_hokku_,--the briefest of all measures, consisting of only seventeen
syllables. Modern love-poems relating to the firefly are legion; but
the majority of these, written in the popular twenty-six-syllable form
called _dodoïtsu_, appear to consist of little more than variants of
one old classic fancy, comparing the silent burning of the insect's
light to the consuming passion that is never uttered.
*
Perhaps my readers will be interested by the following selection of
firefly poems. Some of the compositions are many centuries old:--