The Bow-Moon.
Where the torrent leaps and falls,
And the hanging cliffs look down,
Cloven grey and ruddy walls
Each with ragged forest-crown,
There across the chasmèd deep
Spans a gossamer bridge on high;
And below, from gulfs of sleep,
Mounts the Bow-Moon up the sky.
Blue dusk, thickening whence she rose.
Her abysses veils; above
Moves she into twilight's close
As faint strains of music move.
On the eastern slope her feet,
White, in trancèd ecstasy,
Climb, a ghost of heaven so sweet
That the spent day cannot die.
Walled by crags on either side
Glimmers forth her figure wan,
Straying like some lonely bride
Through the halls of Kubla Khan.
Pilgrim of the riven deep!
Whereso'er thy lover lie,
Sleep to him is troubled sleep
While his Bow-Moon haunts the sky.
Hiroshige's great strength lay in his genius for strikingly effective composition, and in the skill with which he adapted his designs to the limitations of the colour-print technique. He reduced the pictured scene to a few simple elements of a highly decorative character, and managed to make them so symbolic and suggestive that we do not miss the multitude of details which he purposely omits. A strongly dominant unity of impression is the result. His finest designs convey a sense of personal feeling that even the Barbizon artists at their best do not surpass. With the limited resources of the wood block, he achieved subtle renderings of distance, aerial perspective, atmosphere, and light; and the poetic quality of his designs has endeared him to generations of print-lovers in a way more personal than is the case with any other artist. His work will stand beside the "Liber Studiorum" of Turner; it remains perhaps the most complete and magnificent landscape record that any land has ever had.
One curious characteristic of these prints at once strikes the Western eye—the use of a band of dark colour along the top of the picture, which is shaded gradually down into the clear white of the lower sky. This convention serves several purposes. It provides a mass to balance the colour at the bottom of the design, bringing the whole sheet into the picture and not leaving the upper portion as a mere margin above the landscape proper. It also creates depth and atmosphere, setting the brightest part of the design, the middle, back into the frame created by the upper and lower masses. And finally, it renders with peculiar accuracy the effect of gradual vanishing which we actually experience as we look at a landscape: in our visual field, the sky does not end in a sharp line, but blurs and darkens at the upper edge of the space that our eyes survey.
Hiroshige's bird and flower designs are works of extraordinary freshness and loveliness; a unique and idyllic charm emanates from them, and as compositions they take high rank ([Plate 56]).