sense, writes J. Y. Liu in The Art of Chinese Poetry.
In Spirit of Japanese Poetry, Yone Noguchi states:
Poetry should express the truth in its own. way; by that truth we Japanese mean nature; again by that nature the order of spontaneity, Lao Tze says: "Man takes his law from the Earth; the Earth takes its law from Heaven; Heaven its law from Tao; but the law of Tao is its own spontaneity."
For Yone Noguchi, spontaneity means God,
Basho has left a lucid description of the spiritual operation required of the poet. He has to bury his self in the object he is going to treat poetically.
When you see an object, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself; otherwise you impose yourself on the object, and you do not learn. The object and yourself must become one, and from that feeling of oneness issues your poetry. However well phrased it may be, if your feeling is not natural—if the object and yourself are separate—then your poetry is not true poetry, but merely your subjective counterfeit.
You can learn about the pine only from the pine, or about the bamboo only from the bamboo.11 The exact words of Basho are: "As to the pine follow the pine, as to the bamboo follow bamboo." The Japanese word for "follow" is narau, which also means "to imitate," " to learn," "to be in accord with." One of Basho's disciples commented: "Narau is to enter into the object and to bring out what is innerly there and to give it a literary form. When, however, the expression is not in accord with the feeling naturally emanating from the object, there is a split between the object and the expression which violates sincerity." Thus the suchness of things is warped. The poet must become a pine into which the human heart has entered. This process is different from, if not opposite to, the one described by Western poets. Poetry, for Basho, comes from spiritual enlightenment.
For the Japanese reader the poem is not only what is written, but also the invitation to collaborate and widen, by his own imagination, the rich suggestions in the poem. Through a training of many centuries, the Japanese reader can decipher in a few syllables a whole philosophy of life, which he enlarges and deepens through his own meditation.12
We can better understand the concept of nature in Japanese poetry if we think of those painted scrolls in which the human figure is lost in the vast landscape as merely one element of it, like a tree or a stone.
A few rare and vague strokes most carefully conceived and thrown on the silk are but mere suggestion of a rich world of beauty, invisible in the harmony of the wide empty spaces. Painting for centuries has been intimately associated with poetry, especially when expressed in its abstract form, calligraphy; thus it exerted a great influence upon poetry, having suggested, many poetic concepts.
The Chinese painter Wang Li, when asked who his master was, gave an answer similar to the previously quoted description by Basho: "I learned from my heart, my heart learned from my eye, and my eye learned from the Hua Mountain."13 Another Chinese painter, Chin Nung, said, "You paint the branch well and you hear the sound of the wind." Yasunari Kawabata wrote about the poet: "Seeing the moon, he becomes the moon; the moon seen by him becomes him. He sinks into nature, becomes one with nature." In Western poetry, on the contrary, the influence of painting as well as the influence of music was one of exaltation; they have lifted the force of imagination in the works of great poets like Hugo and Goethe.
In the East, as the attitude of man towards nature is pure contemplation, man loses his individuality to be anonymously dissolved in the universe to which he naturally belongs. Basho has expressed this poetical and psychological process in very condensed lines of the previously mentioned poem:
| Furuike ya | Ah, the old pond |
| Kawazu tobikomu | A frog jumps in |
| Mizu no oto | Sound of water. |
The depersonalization of the poet into the surrounding serenity of nature is complete. There is not even the faintest allusion to the beauty of the quiet water into which the frog jumps. The frog breaks the mirror of the water's surface as the sound breaks the silence. This absolute immobility of things is the face of eternity; that is why the small incident of breaking the silent surface of this absolute world takes on enormous proportions. The spirit of the poet is in the total (the silent world) and in. the incident (the splashing of the water) with such a high degree of identification that any intrusion of personal emotion becomes impossible.
Before this vagueness, this quintessence of emotion, it becomes very difficult for the foreign reader to make a judgement about this poetry. For him it remains incomplete, as he is not able to cooperate fully with the poet and explore the possible developments of its complex and multiple meanings.
In early Japanese poetry natural phenomena were considered divine and mountains were sacred. Mount Fuji was worshipped as a tutelary god, as, in minor degree, were other mountains like Tateyama and Tsukuba. The ocean, rivers, and lakes were the homes of gods. For many Japanese they still are. This deep religious feeling, rooted in Shintoism, could not be classified simply as animism, but is certainly one of the explanations for the predominant position nature still takes in Japanese poetry today.
While Japanese poetry is pure contemplation, Western poetry, in its highest expressions, is the fruit of an active attitude. The highest measure of Western life is not contemplation, but action, which is the source of a new being. We see this in Dante, whose poetry is not simply a reflected image of the world as it is; Dante acts and creates his own distinct world. His aim is to take men away from their unfortunate existence and lift them to another state of radiant happiness. As Merejkowsky puts it, Dante is not content in telling something to men, but wants to make of them something they are not, to lift them to the plenitude of their being. This dissatisfaction with nature as it is, this extreme ambition, is the core of Western poetry, which lies at the opposite side of the serene ideals of the East.
Western poetry has no limits to its flight; its aim and ambition are boundless. There are no barriers to its inspiration, as its essence and soul are infinite and eternal. Eastern poetry admits a point, at the highest peak of poetic activity, where further creation becomes impossible. Too great an inspiration, writes Tokoku Kitamura, as that of Basho at Matsushima, causes so complete a submergence of self in the universe that it makes writing impossible. That is why Basho would go no further than to murmur mere exclamations after the name of the beautiful islands:"Matsushima ya, Matsushima ya, Ya Matsushima." Zeami expressed the same idea when he affirmed that the highest point of proficiency in Noh is one in which all performance becomes impossible.
With this concept of nature is linked a sense of time particular to Japanese and Chinese poetry. There are numerous poems written about the nostalgia of seeing the autumn leaves fall, the beautiful red leaves of the maple tree, the fall of snow associated with old age, or tender poems chanting the beauty of new spring leaves or cherry blossoms. But also haiku is linked necessarily, by the rules of its construction, to the seasons of the year. This is so important in haiku collections that seasonal themes received a special name, saijiki.
Here is a haiku inspired by the feeling of the seasons.
Summer:
| Yagate shinu | That soon will die |
| Keshiki wa miezu | Nobody could see |
| Semi no Koe | In the voice of the cicada. |
In this very condensed poem, Basho evokes the hot summer day (the voice of the cicada is enough to suggest the heat of summer and the solitude of the fields), the transience of life, and the brevity of joy (even when a
