Noguchi’s technique is his own, though it would be possible to find in reminiscent phrases suggestions of influence. A man using English words with something of the surprising daring of the Irish peasants on whose talk Mr. Synge modelled his prose, using them, too, like a foreigner who has fallen in love with them, he is able to give them a morning freshness newer and stranger than is given them (though the words of all fine writers are newly discovered) by men whose ancestors have bandied them about. He uses them in short and long lines that, in his later books, learn more and more of rhythm. Rhyme he has not attempted, and it would, I think, have hampered the butterfly-flash of his verse from thought to thought. In The Summer Cloud many of the poems of his early books are altered to prose simply by the plan of their printing. The type is differently set on the page and they are called prose poems. I do not know what led Noguchi to make this experiment, but it proved that the irregular, broken lines in which his poems were originally published had a real power over the effect the words produced. The spaces between the lines were a kind of thought punctuation, and the mind needed these moments between the little, breathless, scarcely-worded sighs that make his poems. In reading them aloud it becomes clear that the ritual of the line-spacing was more important than that of commas or full-stops. Noguchi’s songs are like bird flights, timing themselves with the pulse of the mind that follows them. His ideal is a poetry of pure suggestion whose melody shall be of thought, capricious and uncertain as the mind, but only with the mind’s caprice, the mind’s uncertainty. The following poem was printed as prose in The Summer Cloud, and as it stands here in The Pilgrimage.
“Little Fairy,
Little Fairy by a hearth,
Flight in thine eyes,
Hush on thy feet,
Shall I go with thee up to Heaven
By the road of the fire-flame?
Little Fairy,
Little Fairy by a river,
Dance in thy heart,