Conveying the feelings of poets, their works reflect not only the life of the poets’ souls but the state of the culture at a certain period of time. Poems by Kakinomoto Hitomaro included in Man’yoshu implement all the main theoretical achievements of Japanese poetics of the seventh-eighth centuries and illuminate the themes popular among the poets of this period. Hitomaro’s poems 29 and 30 illuminate similar content in different forms, demonstrating the poet’s ability to express his emotions in the frames of waka and nagauta.
One of the themes frequently illuminated by the poets of the seventh and eighth centuries is their feelings and suffering because of an unhappy love affair. Hitomaro depicts his emotional experience living apart from his beloved girl in the poems 29 and 30. “Kakinomoto no Hitomaro was fully capable of writing lyrical poetry… but he also composed sustained verse, particularly in ‘long poem’ form, on topics of public and stately relevance that were not regarded as the proper concern of later poets” (Varley 46).
Being a court poet, he was obliged to illuminate the social and historical events; this fact proves that his talent allowed him to express all his thoughts in the form of poems. But Hitomaro’s poems describing the life of his soul were especially appreciated. Every word of the poems is meaningful and induces numerous associations. “Hitomaro’s poems are known for their visual imagery (Clinton 2153).
The poet takes advantage in appealing to the imagination of the readers, providing them the opportunity to develop the theme illuminated in his short poems wakas and expand the created picture. By creating the visual images the author is focused on the sensory perception of the readers. Hitomaro makes his readers not only read the words of the poem, hear them, but imagine the characters and objects, and see them. Expressing the feelings, the poet concentrates on the senses as well. Missing the beloved person, the character wants to see him/her. “From the heights of Tsuno Mountain,/ Even through the trees,/ My waving sleeves,/ My darling must have seen” (Clinton 2162).
The trees and mountains symbolize the circumstances preventing the couple from uniting, but with the aim of the language economy and creating visual imagery, the poet uses the physical obstacles that can be seen instead of prolonged explanations. The form and size of poem 30 allowed Hitomaro to create more images, but still economy of the language was the poet’s concern. “Its yellowed leaves/ Scattering in confusion-/ My darling’s sleeves,/ I cannot see them clearly-/ As on spouse concealing/ Yakami/ Mountain” (Clinton 2162). In the latter poem, the same symbols are used, though hope almost abandons the character, and the mood changes. Illuminating the theme of an unhappy love affair in poems 29 and 30 Hitomaro put emphasis on the visual imagery economizing the language material.
The form and size of the poems 29 and 30 differ, the first is written in the form of waka, while the second is a nagauta. It is amazing that the poet manages to express his emotions and tell a story of his separation from the beloved person, his suffering, and hope for the best in four lines of poem 29. The poems under analysis meet all the requirements of this form of the poem, the pattern of altering 5-7-5-7-7 syllables lines is used in poem 30. The themes of the poems are very similar; the difference in the form and size allows developing additional motifs in poem 30, this makes the picture complete, not shifting the frames of the theme.
“They say that if Japanese poetry is in danger of dying out, [Hitomaro] will without fail come back to the world of men and pass on the art as before” (Commons 157). Hitomaro is one of the most prominent Japanese poets, whose talent let him devote the poems 29 and 30 to the same topic, but choose different forms for the realization of his intention.
Works Cited
Clinton, Jerome, Abiola Irele, Heather James. The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Norton and Co, 2009: 3134.
Commons, Anne. Hitomaro: Poet as God. Brill Hotei Publishing, 2009: 223.
Varley, Paul. Japanese Culture. University of Hawaii Press, 2000: 367.