Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Asia: Vols. XXI–XXIII. 1876–79. | | | | Introductory to Japan | | Japan | | Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) |
| | (From Kéramos)
CRADLED and rocked in Eastern seas, | |
| The islands of the Japanese | |
| Beneath me lie; o’er lake and plain | |
| The stork, the heron, and the crane | |
| Through the clear realms of azure drift, | 5 |
| And on the hillside I can see | |
| The villages of Imari, | |
| Whose thronged and flaming workshops lift | |
| Their twisted columns of smoke on high, | |
| Cloud-cloisters that in ruins lie, | 10 |
| With sunshine streaming through each rift, | |
| And broken arches of blue sky. | |
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| All the bright flowers that fill the land, | |
| Ripple of waves on rock or sand, | |
| The snow on Fujyama’s cone, | 15 |
| The midnight heaven so thickly sown | |
| With constellations of bright stars, | |
| The leaves that rustle, the reeds that make | |
| A whisper by each stream and lake, | |
| The saffron dawn, the sunset red, | 20 |
| Are painted on these lovely jars; | |
| Again the skylark sings, again | |
| The stork, the heron, and the crane | |
| Float through the azure overhead, | |
| The counterfeit and counterpart | 25 |
| Of Nature reproduced in Art. | | | | |
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