Both of these poems were honored by being included in Imperial collections, but it is obvious that they are in essence the same poem. To say this, however, would not detract from the value of either poem in the eyes of the authors or of traditional Japanese critics. It may be difficult for a modern Western reader to sympathize with such a point of view, but it might have seemed less strange to a seventeenth-century English poet who sang the beauties of Cynthia or who proclaimed the doctrine of carpe diem.
What draws most of us to Japanese poetry is not the polish of a perfectly turned verse on the red maple leaves floating on blue waves but the living voice of a poet talking about love, death, and the few other themes common to all men. The “Man’yōshū” is the easiest collection for us to appreciate because of its range of subjects and its powerful imagery. The “Kokinshū” also has poems which move us, but some of the most famous ones, masterpieces of diction and vowel harmonies, must unfortunately remain beyond communication to Western readers.
The court nobles, who wrote most of the poems in the “Kokinshū,” continued to be the chief contributors to the successive Imperial anthologies. The skill of some of these poets is quite remarkable, but the subjects to which they applied their skill were often inadequate.
The next major collection after the “Kokinshū” was the “Shinkokinshū,” or “New Collection of Ancient and Modern Poetry,” compiled in the Kamakura Period, after the terrible warfare which ended the Heian Period. Much of the gloom and solitude of those times is discoverable in the poetry, particularly that of the outstanding contributor to the “Shinkokinshū,” the priest Saigyō (1118–1190). His waka—thirty-one-syllabled poems—are among the most beautiful and melancholy in the language.
The same melancholy may also be found in “The Tale of the Heike,” the greatest of the war tales—which were among the characteristic literary products of the Kamakura Period. These tales contain many descriptions of military glory, of men in magnificent armor riding into battle, but what we remember most vividly are the scenes of loneliness and sorrow—the death of the boy Atsumori or the description of the life of the former Empress in the solitude
