When I put that into English, the music is gone, and the beauty of several dialect-words, such as “dine” (meaning the dinner hour, therefore the midday), and the melody have disappeared. Still the poetry remains. Two men in some foreign country, after years of separation, and one reminds the other of childhood days when both played in the village brook from the sunrise until dinner-time—so much delighted by the water! Only a little brook, one says;—but the breadth of oceans, the width of half the world, has been between us since that time. Now, anybody who, as a boy, loved to play or swim in the stream of his native village with other boys, can feel what the poet means; whether he be a Japanese or a Scotchman makes no difference at all. That is poetry.

And now, so much having been said on the subject of the emotional essence of poetry, I want to tell you that in the course of such lectures on poetry as we shall have in the course of the academic year, I shall try always to keep these facts before you and to select for our reading only those things which contain the thought of poetry that will bear the test of translation. Much of our English poetry will not do this. I think, for example, that it is a great mistake to set before Japanese students such 18th century birth [work?] as the verse of Pope. As verse it is perhaps the most perfect of the English language, as poetry it is nothing at all. The essence of poetry is not in Pope, nor is it to be found in most of the 18th century school.

That was an age in which it was the fashion to keep all emotion suppressed. But Pope is a useful study for English classes in England, because of what English students can take from it through the mere study of form, of compact and powerful expression with very few words. Here, the situation is exactly converse. The value of foreign poetry to you cannot be in the direction of form. Foreign form cannot be reproduced in Japanese any more than French can be produced into English. The value of foreign poetry is in what makes the soul, the heart, the heart of all poetry:—feeling and imagination. Foreign feeling and foreign imagination may help to add something to the beauty and the best quality of future Japanese poetry. There I think the worth of study may be very great. But when foreign poetry means nothing but correct verse, you might as well waste no time upon it; as there is much great poetry which has good form as well as strong feeling.

INDEX