turbulent, indomitable reaction against the despotism of fact.” Here is one of my beloved uta-poems of his which it is said he wrote at a certain shrine:
“Know I not at all who is within,
But from the heart of gratitude,
My tears fall,
Again my tears fall, …”
Although it may sound strange, it is true that Saigyo failed as a poet, in my opinion, through his hatred of life and the world (how many hundred Western poets fail through their love of the World and Life), because not from impulse and dream like Yeats, but I might say from the Buddhistic superstition and motive he looked upon the whisper and beauty far beyond time and winds. It was the Chinese classics and Buddhism that weakened our Japanese poetry in most cases; it is not difficult to see what we shall lose fundamentally from coming, as we have come to-day, face to face with the Western literature. When I admire the Irish literature as I do, it is in its independent aloofness from the others, sad but pleasing like an elegy heard across the seas of the infinite, with
