Thank God! I shall sleep to-night.
Oh, come, butterfly.”
That is valuable as a talisman rather than as a picture. It is a pearl to be dissolved in the wine of a mood. Pearls are not wine, nor in themselves to be thought of as drink, but there is a kind of magic in the wine in which they are dissolved.
In Noguchi’s poems there is the co-operation between silence and speech of which Carlyle was thinking when he wrote: “In a Symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore by Silence and Speech acting together, comes a double significance. And if both the Speech be itself high, and the Silence fit and noble, how expressive will their union be!” In many poems of the French symbolists the Speech is almost meaningless, except in the Silence that is covered by its melody. In Noguchi both Speech and Silence are full of a charm that we can scarcely find in life but in fortunate rare moods. He writes:
“I am stirring the waves of Reverie with my meaningless but wisdom-wreathed syllables.”
But he is incapable of denying his own charm to the carefully-worded accompaniment of the Silence with which he is really concerned. He sees the world with eyes too guileless not to make it alive, even when using it as an invocation. He sees ideas too clearly not to make them, even in a spell, independently vivid for his listeners. For an example of the one take this picture:
“Alas, the mother cow, with matron eyes, utters her bitter heart, kidnapped of her children by the curling gossamer mist!”
For an example of the other, this idea:
“The Universe, too, has somewhere its shadow; but what about my songs?
An there be no shadow, no echoing to the end—my broken-throated lute will never again be made whole.”