For thy comfort, Lord, we pray, Namu Amida Butsu! In the rice-fields, day by day, Now the strong ones comb the grain; Once we laughed there in the rain, Stooping low in sun and cold For our helpless young and old; In the rice-fields day by day, Namu Amida Butsu! And the last stanza is imbued with the Buddhistic resignation, the desire to pass, to be reabsorbed, reinvested, reborn. It is philosophical after the Karmic law, and beautiful in spirit even to a Western mind: For thy mercy, Lord, we pray, Namu Amida Butsu! Let the old roots waste away, That the green may pierce the light! Life and thought, in withered plight, Choke the morning. Far beneath Stirs the young blade in its sheath. Let the old roots pass away! Namu Amida Butsu! This is symbolism which upon a cursory reading one might lose entirely, thinking its import to be, let the old die and give place to the young; whereas it is, let the old in oneself, the outworn, the material, the inefficacious, die, and give place to the new. That the green may pierce the light:— that out of physical decay a regrowth of the spirit may spring; for already, Far beneath Stirs the young blade in its sheath:— the soul is quickening for the upper air and making ready to burst its detaining mould. How beautiful is the recognition that Life and thought, in withered plight, Choke the morning, the young eternal self, that, having fulfilled the conditions of Karma in its present embodiment of destiny, is obeying the resistless law that calls it to new modes of being. It is unnecessary to be of the Buddhistic faith to feel the spell and the beauty of its philosophy. Mrs. Fenollosa’s gift is chiefly lyrical, although her sonnets and descriptive poems have many passages of beauty; the picturesque in fancy and phrasing is ever at her command, and there are few poems in which one is not arrested by some unique expression, or bit of imagery, as this from “An Eastern Cry”: Beneath the maples crickets wake, _And chip the silence, flake on flake_. Or that in which the rain Brimmed great magnolias up with scented wine. Or the fir-tree stood, With clotted plumage sagging to the land. Or when Fujiyama seen at dawn is pictured as A crown … self poised in mist, and again as A frail mirage of Paradise Set in the quickening air. So true in color and vision are Mrs. Fenollosa’s lyrics that one cannot understand how in a sonnet she can be guilty of so mixed a metaphor as this describing a “Morning On Fujisan”: Through powdered mist of dawn-lit pearl and rose There lifts one lotos-peak of cleaving white, The swan-like rhapsody of dying night, Which, softly soaring through the ether, blows To hang there breathless….