He is a poet whose flame has been so scrupulously tended as to flicker with the slightest breath. He is as many-mooded as the combinations between sunshine and shadow. His poetry actually is the thing that has induced a mood in him, trimmed of all that he has had to remove for himself, and so made into something between nature and that pure elevation of mind from which Noguchi feels. This quality of pale flame-like emotion is common to all his poems, extraordinarily various as they are.
Sometimes he speaks with grandeur, as in these lines:
“When I am lost in the deep body of the mist on a hill,
The universe seems built with me as its pillar!
Am I the God upon the face of the deep, nay deepless deepness in the beginning?”
Sometimes wistfully:
“Alas! my soul is like a paper lantern, its paste wetted off under the rain.
My love, wilt thou not come back to-night?
Lo, the snail at my door stealthily hides his horns.
Oh, put forth thy honourable horns for my sake!