Ware to waga
Kara ya tomurō—
Semi no koe.—Yayū.
Methinks that semi sits and sings by his former body,—
Chanting the funeral service over his own dead self.
This cast-off skin, or simulacrum,—clinging to bole or branch as in life, and seeming still to stare with great glazed eyes,—has suggested many things both to profane and to religious poets. In love-songs it is often likened to a body consumed by passionate longing. In Buddhist poetry it becomes a symbol of earthly pomp,—the hollow show of human greatness:—
Yo no naka yo
Kaeru no hadaka
Semi no kinu!
Naked as frogs and weak we enter this life of trouble;
Shedding our pomps we pass: so semi quit their skins.
But sometimes the poet compares the winged and shrilling semi to a human ghost, and the broken shell to the body left behind:—
註
