Sémi hitotsu
Matsu no yū-hi wo
Kakaé-kéri.
Lo! on the topmost pine, a solitary cicada
Vainly attempts to clasp one last red beam of sun.
IV
PHILOSOPHICAL verses do not form a numerous class of Japanese poems upon sémi; but they possess an interest altogether exotic. As the metamorphosis of the butterfly supplied to old Greek thought an emblem of the soul's ascension, so the natural history of the cicada has furnished Buddhism with similitudes and parables for the teaching of doctrine.
Man sheds his body only as the sémi sheds its skin. But each reincarnation obscures the memory of the previous one: we remember our former existence no more than the sémi remembers the shell from which it has emerged. Often a sémi may be found in the act of singing beside its cast-off skin; therefore a poet has written:—
Waré to waga
Kara ya tomurō—
Sémi no koë.
—Yayū.
Methinks that sémi sits and sings by his former body,—
Chanting the funeral service over his own dead self.
This cast-off skin, or simulacrum,—clinging to bole or branch as in life, and seeming still to stare with great glazed eyes,—has suggested many things both to profane and to religious poets. In love-songs it is often likened to a body consumed by passionate longing. In Buddhist poetry it becomes a symbol of earthly pomp,—the hollow show of human greatness:—
Yo no naka yo
Kaëru no hadaka,
Sémi no kinu!
Naked as frogs and weak we enter this life of trouble;
Shedding our pomps we pass: so sémi quit their skins.