The Flower of Old Japan and Other Poems
Alfred Noyes
9781465656933
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
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. But this revelation is the sole end and object of all true art; and I hope it may not be 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 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 directions and postulating, at once, an infinite God.
