But sometimes the poet compares the winged and shrilling sémi to a human ghost, and the broken shell to the body left behind:—
Tamashii wa
Ukiyo ni naité,
Sémi no kara.
Here the forsaken shell: above me the voice of the creature
Shrills like the cry of a Soul quitting this world of pain.
Then the great sun-quickened tumult of the cicadæ—landstorm of summer life foredoomed so soon to pass away—is likened by preacher and poet to the tumult of human desire. Even as the sémi rise from earth, and climb to warmth and light, and clamor, and presently again return to dust and silence,—so rise and clamor and pass the generations of men:—
Yagaté shinu
Keshiki wa miézu,
Sémi no koë.
—Bashō.
Never an intimation in all those voices of sémi
How quickly the hush will come,—how speedily all must die.
I wonder whether the thought in this little verse does not interpret something of that summer melancholy which comes to us out of nature's solitudes with the plaint of insect-voices. Unconsciously those millions of millions of tiny beings are preaching the ancient wisdom of the East,—the perpetual Sûtra of Impermanency.
Yet how few of our modern poets have given heed to the voices of insects!
Perhaps it is only to minds inexorably haunted by the Riddle of Life that Nature can speak to-day, in those thin sweet trillings, as she spake of old to Solomon.
The Wisdom of the East hears all things. And he that obtains it will hear the speech of insects,—as Sigurd, tasting the Dragon's Heart, heard suddenly the talking of birds.