Page:In ghostly Japan (IA cu31924014202687).pdf/172

As for audible poetry, wherever there is working there is singing. The toil of the fields and the labor of the streets are performed to the rhythm of chanted verse; and song would seem to be an expression of the life of the people in about the same sense that it is an expression of the life of cicadæ…. As for visible poetry, it appears everywhere, written or graven,—in Chinese or in Japanese characters,—as a form of decoration. In thousands and thousands of dwellings, you might observe that the sliding-screens, separating rooms or closing alcoves, have Chinese or Japanese decorative texts upon them;—and these texts are poems. In houses of the better class there are usually a number of gaku, or suspended tablets to be seen,—each bearing, for all design, a beautifully written verse. But poems can be found upon almost any kind of domestic utensil,—for example upon braziers, iron kettles, vases, wooden trays, lacquer ware, porcelains, chopsticks of the finer sort,—even toothpicks! Poems are painted upon shop-signs, panels, screens, and fans. Poems are printed upon towels, draperies, curtains, kerchiefs, silk-linings, and women’s crêpe-silk underwear. Poems are stamped or worked upon letter-