frogs, with rain; the butterfly, with flowers; the bat, with the willow-tree. Every Japanese child knows something about these regulations. Now, it so happens that no such relations have been clearly fixed for the dragon-fly in tanka-poetry,—though in pictures we often see it perched on the edge of a water-bucket, or upon an ear of ripened rice. Moreover, in the classification of subject-groupings for poetry, the dragon-fly is not placed among mushi ("insects"—by which word the poet nearly always means a musical insect of some sort), but among zō,—a term of very wide signification; for it includes the horse, cat, dog, monkey, crow, sparrow, tortoise, snake, frog,—almost all fauna, in short.
Thus the rarity of tanka-poems about dragon-flies may be explained. But why should dragon-flies be almost ignored in dodoitsu? Probably for the reason that this form of verse is usually devoted to the subject of love. The voiceless dragon-fly can suggest to the love-poet no such fancies as those inspired by the singing-insects,—especially by those night-crickets whose music lingers in the memory of some evening tryst. Out of several hundred dragon-fly poems collected for me, I find only seven relating, directly or indirectly, to the subject of love; and not one of the seven is in twenty-six syllable verse.
註
