I translate ukiyo by “this world”: the more scrupulous dictionary renders it by “this fleeting or miserable world, so full of vicissitudes and unsettled.” For the “vale of tears” is not a Christian concept only: Mrs. Gummidge was also a Buddhist without knowing it. It is curious that this theological term, with its disparaging connotation, was affixed to the modern popular school of painters, among whom Hokusai is the best known, because they descended from lofty, conventional subjects to the life of workaday folk. The central thought of the poem, however, narrowed to a romantic application, recalls a line by Browning:
“Never the time and place, and the loved one altogether.”
Writers of Dodoitsu have this advantage over versifiers who employ more classical metres, that they are not forced by convention to repeat stereotyped fancies, but are at liberty to invent new ones. The balloon, the camera, the locomotive, may take the place of dragon, stork, and phœnix. This pouring of foreign wine into native bottles produces a quaint blend. A girl thus reproaches her lover with
Inconstancy.
My heart to body
Fuel to engine;
Thy heart an air-ship
Loose in the sky.
Here the similes are plain and forcible. The next poem is less lucid: