Lines 1-3

With its haunting simile, the opening lines of "The Garden Shukkei-en" create the tone for the poem. The speaker compares crossing a river "by way of a vanished bridge" to the way "a cloud of lifted snow would ascend a mountain." This imagery evokes an otherworldly place, where the details of the present are barely visible. The "she" of the third line refers to the speaker's companion, a Japanese survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima.

Lines 4-7

In these lines, the speaker is reporting on the memories of her companion, who is haunted by images of the past. The people "crying for help" are victims of the atomic bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima. The bomb destroyed the city and killed more than half of its 400,000 residents. The shock of the bombing was such that neither "tears nor lamentation" made any difference to the burnt...