Title: The Flower of Old Japan, and Other Poems
Author: Alfred Noyes
Release date: June 11, 2021 [eBook #65592]
Language: English
Credits: Tim Lindell, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
THE FLOWER OF OLD JAPAN
AND OTHER POEMS
BY
ALFRED NOYES
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1907
All rights reserved
{iv}
Copyright, 1907,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1907.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
{v}
It is a perilous adventure—the writing of a preface, however brief, to one’s own poems. For one may be tempted to re-state matters that could find their full elucidation only in the verses themselves. Tennyson once remarked that poetry is like shot silk, glancing with many colours; and any attempt to define its meanings is as great a mistake as the attempt of nineteenth-century materialism to enclose the infinite universe in its logical nut-shells. Through poetry alone, whether of deeds or words, thought or colour, passion or marble, is it possible to approach the Infinite, or as Blake did:—
But this revelation is the sole end and object of all true art; and I hope it may not be{x} thought presumptuous to say here simply that—whether the attempt be a success or a failure—it was especially my own aim in the two following poems. If the feet of childhood are set dancing in them, it was because as children we are best able to enter into that Kingdom of Dreams which is also the only true, the only real, Kingdom. The first tale, for instance, must not be taken to have any real relation to Japan. It belongs—as the Spectator put it—to the kind of dreamland which an imaginative child might construct out of the oddities of a willow-pattern plate, and it differs chiefly from Wonderlands of the Lewis Carrol type in a certain seriousness behind its fantasy. It is astonishing to me that these things require comment; but undoubtedly they do. For, on the one hand, the first tale has been praised enthusiastically as a vivid picture of Japan, and the author has not only had to correspond with Tokyo on the subject, but was also invited to meetings of the Japan Society in London! On the other hand, because the child-voices are allowed to declare that Tusitala lies asleep in that distant country of dreams, a prosaic English critic once wrote a lengthy review in{xi} an important paper to point out my gross ignorance of the fact that Stevenson was really buried in Samoa! The tales are ‘such stuff as dreams are made on’; but—as a kinder critic has remarked—‘we ourselves are made of that stuff.’ It is perhaps because these poems are almost light enough for a nonsense-book that I feel there is something in them more elemental, more essential, more worthy of serious consideration, than the most ponderous philosophical poem I could write. They are based on the fundamental and very simple mystery of the universe—that anything, even a grain of sand, should exist at all. If we could understand that, we could understand everything! Set clear of all irrelevancies, that is the simple problem that has been puzzling all the ages; and it is well sometimes to forget our accumulated ‘knowledge’ and return to it in all its childish naïveté. It is well to face that inconceivable miracle, that fundamental impossibility which happens to have been possible, that contradiction in terms, that fundamental paradox, for which we have at best only a cruciform symbol, with its arms pointing in opposite{xii} directions and postulating, at once, an infinite God.
The inscription on the “Wisdom Looking-Glass”; the discovery by the children that the self-limitation of their little wishes was necessary not only to their own happiness, but to the harmony of the whole world; the development of the same idea in the passages leading up to the song—What does it take to make a rose?—where a divine act of loving self-limitation, an eternal self-sacrifice, an everlasting passion of the Godhead, such as perhaps was shadowed forth on Calvary, is found to be at the heart of the Universe, and to be—as it were—the highest aspect of the Paradox aforesaid, the living secret and price of our very existence; these things are only one twisted strand of the ‘shot silk’ out of which the two tales are woven. It is no new wisdom to regard these things through the eyes of little children; and I know—however insignificant they may be to others—these two tales contain as deep and true things as I, personally, have the power to express. I hope, therefore, that I may be pardoned, in these hurried days, for pointing out that the two poems are not to be{xiii} taken merely as fairy-tales, but as an attempt to follow the careless and happy feet of childhood back into the kingdom of those dreams which, as we said above, are the sole reality worth living and dying for; those beautiful dreams, or those fantastic jests—if any care to call them so—for which mankind has endured so many triumphant martyrdoms that even amidst the rush and roar of modern materialism they cannot be quite forgotten.
ALFRED NOYES.
{xiv}
Ourselves. |
The Tall Thin Man. |
The Dwarf behind the Twisted Pear-tree. |
Creeping Sin. |
The Mad Moonshee. |
The Nameless One. |
Pirates, Mandarins, Bonzes, Priests, Jugglers, Merchants, Ghastroi, Weirdrians, etc. |
To
HELEN, ROSIE
and
BEATRIX
By ALFRED NOYES
Poems
With an Introduction by Hamilton Mabie
Cloth, 12mo, $1.25 net
“Imagination, the capacity to perceive vividly and feel sincerely, and the gift of fit and beautiful expression in verse-form—if these may be taken as the equipment of a poet, nearly all of this volume is poetry. And if to the sum of these be added the indescribable increment of charm which comes occasionally to the work of some poet, quite unearned by any of these catalogued qualities of his, you have a fair measure of Mr. Noyes at his best.... Two considerations render Mr. Noyes interesting above most poets: the wonderful degree in which the personal charm illumines what he has already written, and the surprises which one feels may be in store in his future work. His feelings have already so much variety and so much apparent sincerity that it is impossible to tell in what direction his genius will develop. In whatever style he writes,—the mystical, the historical-dramatic, the impassioned description of natural beauty, the ballad, the love lyric,—he has the peculiarity of seeming in each style to have found the truest expression of himself.”—Louisville Courier-Journal.
PUBLISHED BY
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A History of
English Poetry
BY W. J. COURTHOPE, C.B., D.Litt., LL.D.
Late Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford
Cloth, 8vo, $3.25 net per volume
VOLUME I. The Middle Ages—Influence of the Roman Empire—The Encyclopædic Education of the Church—The Feudal System.
VOLUME II. The Renaissance and the Reformation—Influence of the Court and the Universities.
VOLUME III. English Poetry in the Seventeenth Century—Decadent Influence of the Feudal Monarchy—Growth of the National Genius.
VOLUME IV. Development and Decline of the Poetic Drama—Influence of the Court and the People.
VOLUME V. The Constitutional Compromise of the Eighteenth Century—Effects of the Classical Renaissance—Its Zenith and Decline—The Early Romantic Renaissance.
“It is his privilege to have made a contribution of great value and signal importance to the history of English Literature.”—Pall Mall Gazette.
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