"In their poetry above everything the Japanese have remained impervious to alien influences. It owes this conservation to its prosody. Without rhyme, without variety of metre, without elasticity of dimensions, it is also without known counterpart. To alter it in any way would be to deprive it of all distinguishing characteristics. At some remote date a Japanese maker of songs seems to have discovered that a peculiar and very fascinating rhythm is produced by lines containing 5 syllables and 7 syllables alternately. That is Japanese poetry (uta or tanka). There are generally five lines: the first and third consisting of 5 syllables, the second, fourth and fifth of 7, making a total of 31 in all. The number of lines is not compulsory: sometimes they may reach to thirty, forty or even more, but the alternation of 5 and 7 syllables is compulsory. The most attenuated form of all is the hokku (or haikai) which consists of only three lines, namely, 17 syllables. Necessarily the ideas embodied in such a narrow vehicle must be fragmentary. Thus it results that Japanese poems are, for the most part, impressionist; they suggest a great deal more than they actually express. Here is an example:
Momiji-ha wo
Kaze ni makasete
Miru yori mo
Hakanaki mono wa
Inochi nari keri
This may be translated:
More fleeting than the glint of withered leaf wind-blown, the thing called life."*
*See Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, article "Japan."
The sketchy nature of Japanese poetry, especially in this five-line stanza, may be illustrated further by two poems quoted by Prof. B. H. Chamberlain in his "Things Japanese" (pp. 375-376),
The first:
Hototogisu
Nakitsuru kata wo
Nagamureba—
Tada ari-ake no
Tsuki zo nokoreru
is literally translated by Professor Chamberlain as follows:
"When I gaze towards the place where the cuckoo has been singing, nought remains but the moon in the early dawn."