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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn: The taste for Japanese poetry of the epigrammatic sort is a taste that must
be slowly acquired; and it is only by degrees, after patient study, that
the possibilities of such composition can be fairly estimated. Hasty
criticism has declared that to put forward any serious claim on behalf of
seventeen-syllable poems "would be absurd." But what, then, of Crashaw's
famous line upon the miracle at the marriage feast in Cana?--
Nympha pudica Deum vidit, et erubuit. [1]
Only fourteen syllables -- and immortality. Now with seventeen Japanese
syllables things quite as wonderful -- indeed, much more wonderful -- have
been done, not once or twice, but probably a thousand times... However,
there is nothing wonderful in the following hokku, which have been selected
Kwaidan |
