The coils of jet?
Lank whisps, scant curls wither now
On wilted flesh;
And twin-arches, moth-brows tinge no more
With the hue of far hills. “Oh cover, cover
From the creeping light of dawn
Silted seaweed locks that of a hundred years
Lack now but one.
Oh hide me from my shame.”[1]
It is such poetry as this, and the hard and formal structure of the plots, which have most attracted Western readers to the Nō. Yeats, in explaining why he had adopted the form of the Nō for his series of plays on Irish legends, declared, “It is natural that I go to Asia for a stage-convention, for more formal faces, for a chorus that has no part in the action … A mask will enable me to substitute for the face of some commonplace player … the fine invention of a sculptor. A mask … no matter how close you go is still a work of art … and we shall not lose by staying the movement of the features, for deep feeling is expressed by a movement of the whole body.”[2] In the poetry itself, as revealed to him in translation, Yeats discovered patterns of symbols which also attracted him greatly. But not even in Waley’s fine translations can the full power of the poetry of the Nō be revealed, and judgments on its quality must be based on the originals.
In the styles used in the Nō plays we have another parallel with the Greek theatre. There is a marked difference in the language of quiet and emotionally important scenes, a difference like that between the iambics and the choral songs of a Greek
