“My soul, like a chilly winged fly, roams about the sadness-walled body, hunting for a casement to fly out.
Lo, suddenly, an inspired bird flies upright into the atom-eyed sky!
Alas, his reflection sinks far down into the mileless bottom of the mirrory rivulet!
Is this world the solid being?—or a shadowy nothing?
Is the form that flies up the real bird? or the figure that sinks down?”
And again:
“The world is not my residence to the end!
Alas, the moon has lost her way, harassed among the leaf-fellows on the darkling hill-top!
Isn’t there chance for my flying out?”
The world is not too much with this poet of Japan who writes in our language, and it is interesting to compare this symbolist of a nation of conscious symbolists with the few men who in France and England have turned an unconscious but almost universal practice into a theory of poetry.[12]