Alfred Noyes

Old Japan (1902)

In old Japan, by creek and bay,
The blue plum-blossoms blow,
Where birds with sea-blue plumage gay
Through sea-blue branches go:
Dragons are coiling down below
Like dragons on a fan;
And pig-tailed sailors lurching slow
Through streets of old Japan.

There, in the dim blue death of day
Where white tea roses grow,
Petals and scents are strewn astray
Till night be sweet enow;
Then lovers wander whispering low
As lovers only can,
Where rosy paper lanterns glow
Through streets of old Japan.

From Wonderland to Yea-or-Nay
The junks with painted prow
Dream on the purple water-way
Nor ever meet a foe;
Though still, with stiff mustachio
And crooked ataghan,
Their pirates guard with pomp and show
The ships of old Japan.

How far beyond the dawning day
The glories ebb and flow,
Where still the wonder-children play,
The witches mop and mow;
How far, how far, no chart may show,
The heart of mortal man,
The light, the splendour, and the glow
That once were old Japan!

That land is very far away
We lost it long ago!
In old Japan the grass is grey,
The trees are white with snow;
The sea-blue bird became a crow,
The lizards leapt and ran,
No dragon mourned that overthrow,
The dream of old Japan.

In old Japan, at windows grey,
Where scents of opium flow,
Strange smiling faces, white as clay,
Nod idly to and fro;
There life and death may come and go,
With blessing or with ban,
And still no better gift bestow
Than this, in old Japan.

And now the wistful years delay
To wonder why and how
The blue fantastic twisted day,
When Emperor Hwang or Chow
Dreamed in the colour and the glow
That light the heart of man,
Could e’er such hours of flowers bestrow
Through streets of old Japan.

In old Japan they used to play
A game forgotten now;
They filled a nacre-coloured tray
With perfumes in a row,
Breathing of all the flowers that blow
Where dark-blue rivers ran,
Like those upon the plates, you know,
Through fields of old Japan;

Then with silver spatula
The mandarins would go
To test the scented dust and say,
With many a hum and ho,
What flower of all the flowers that grow
For joy of maid or man,
Conceived the scents that puzzled so
The brains of old Japan.

In old Japan, where poets pray
With white uplifted brow,
What mystic floating scents delay
Below the purple bough,
O’er plains no scythe of death may mow,
Nor power of reason scan?
What mandarin musicians know
The flower of old Japan?

There, in the dim blue death of day
Where white tea-roses grow,
Petals and scents are strewn astray
Till night be sweet enow,
Then lovers wander, whispering low
As lovers only can,
Where rosy paper lanterns glow
Through streets of old Japan.

Alfred Noyes (1880-1958) was the most commercially successful poet of his day, even if even in his own time some accused him of being more peddler of popular taste than serious poet. His full-length books number nearly sixty, all from major presses, most in both British and American editions. He was the Lowell Lecturer in English at Harvard University (1913) and the Murray Professor of Modern English Literature at Princeton University (1914-1923), a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (1918), and received honorary doctorates from Yale (1913), Glasgow (1927), and Syracuse (1943) Universities and the Univesity of California, Berkeley (1944). ‘Old Japan’ appeared in his first book, The Loom of Years (London: Richards, 1902), published while he was a student at Oxford. The poem appears revised as ‘A Triple Ballad of Old Japan’ in the 1927 Collected Poems. See further notes about Noyes’s Japan at CA2 in the Bibliography.

A few Noyes titles remain in print, but none that include his evocations of Old Japan.