Although it is not one of Sakutarō’s more harrowing compositions and does not contain the nightmarish imagery of so much of his poetry, Spring Night nevertheless creates a hauntingly melancholic mood by employing visual imagery to evoke the mystery of things not seen and a sort of godlike compassion for them. The poem alludes to the grand scheme of things in an unembellished way characteristic of what is best in Sakutarō’s poetry.

The poem begins by calling attention immediately to concrete imagery: “Things like littlenecks, / things like quahogs, / things like water-fleas, / these organisms, bodies buried in sand” (101). The setting is a beach, but by the fourth line the images summoned to the mind’s eye by the words littlenecks, quahogs, and water-fleas are revised by the appositive “bodies buried in sand.” The reader is thus given to understand that the real subject of this poem is not the aquatic life (those specific “things”) invoked by gross comparisons (“like . . . like . . . like”), but an immense and various world of “organisms” entirely out of sight.

Out of sight, too, “hands like silk threads innumerably grow,” and these “move as the waves do.” The poem’s speaker feels “pity” for the organisms over which “the brine flows” and conveys compassion (by means of synecdoche) for other unseen lives: “even the tongues of clams, flickering” are “looking sad” on this spring night.

Then the speaker sees something on the beach in the distance that strikes him: “a row of invalids, bodies below their waists missing, is walking, / walking unsteadily.” The shiver of recognition that the invalids and the unseen organisms are equally frail and equally alive is expressed succinctly by an expletive and the observation that follows: “Ah, over the hair of those human beings as well, / passes the spring night haze, all over, deeply, / rolling, rolling in.”

The poem works by juxtaposing two initially contrasting sets of signifiers: the first evokes the vast world of hidden and invisible life forms; the second carefully describes a single file of frail human beings. The juxtaposition calls attention to the circumstance that the people are also only faintly seen, also partly submerged in the sand and surf through which they walk in the dark of night.

Spring Night closes with the ambiguous line “this white row of waves is ripples.” The image in that line seems to refer at once to the receding foam of breakers on the beach, to the people “walking unsteadily” in the surf, and—by the extension implied in the poem’s initial similes—to all of the inconspicuous generations (“ripples”) of life moving about in the planet’s biosphere virtually unnoticed (see Ecopoetics), but moving nevertheless—moving back and forth “as the waves do.”

Bibliography
Hagiwara, Sakutarō. Howling at the Moon: Poems and Prose of Hagiwara Sakutarō. Translated and introduced by Hiroaki Sato. Copenhagen and Los Angeles: Green Integer (#57), 2002.

Categories: Japanese Literature, Literature, World Literature

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