LE DAIMIO (Matin de bataille)

  Sous le noir fouet de guerre a quadruple pompon,
  L’etalon belliqueux en hennissant se cabre,
  Et fait bruire, avec de cliquetis de sabre,
  La cuirasse de bronze aux lames du jupon.

  Le Chef vetu d’airain, de laque et de crepon,
  Otant le masque a poils de son visage glabre,
  Regarde le volcan sur un ciel de cinabre
  Dresser la neige ou rit l’aurore du Nippon.

  Mais il a vu, vers l’Est eclabousse d’or, l’astre,
  Glorieux d’eclairer ce matin de desastre,
  Poindre, orbe eblouissant, au-dessus de la mer;

  Et pour couvrir ses yeux dont pas un cil ne bouge,
  Il ouvre d’un seul coup son eventail de fer,
  Ou dans le satin blanc se leve un Soleil rouge.

“Under the black war whip with its quadruple pompon the fierce stallion, whinnying, curvets, and makes the rider’s bronze cuirass ring against the plates of his shirt of mail, with a sound like the clashing of sword blades.

“The Chief, clad in bronze and lacquer and silken crape, removing the bearded masque from his beardless face, turns his gaze to the great volcano, lifting its snows into the cinnabar sky where the dawn of Nippon begins to smile.

“Nay! he has already seen the gold-spattered day star, gloriously illuminating the morning of disaster, rise, a blinding disk, above the seas.  And to shade his eyes, on both of which not even a single eyelash stirs, he opens with one quick movement his iron fan, wherein upon a field of white satin there rises a crimson sun.”

Of course this hasty translation is very poor; and you can only get from it the signification and colour of the picture—­the beautiful sonority and luminosity of the French is all gone.  Nevertheless, I am sure that the more you study the original the more you will see how fine it is.  Here also is a Japanese colour print.  We see the figure of the horseman on the shore, in the light of dawn; behind him the still dark sky of night; before him the crimson dawn, and Fuji white against the red sky.  And in the open fan, with its red sun, we have a grim suggestion of the day of blood that is about to be; that is all.  But whoever reads that sonnet will never forget it; it burns into the memory.  So, indeed, does everything that Heredia writes.  Unfortunately he has not yet written anything more about Japan.

I have quoted Heredia because I think that no other poet has even approached him in the attempt to make a Japanese picture—­though many others have tried; and the French, nearly always, have done much better than the English, because they are more naturally artists.  Indeed one must be something of an artist to write anything in the way of good poetry on a Japanese subject.  If you look at the collection “Poems of Places,” in the library, you will see how poorly Japan is there represented; the only respectable piece of foreign work being by Longfellow, and that is only about Japanese vases.  But since then some English poems have appeared which are at least worthy of Japanese notice.