BD. Edmund Blunden

3. Far East. [Tokyo: privately printed], 1925.

		Reprinted in Japanese Garland and Near and Far.

Blunden’s Christmas card for 1925 (see also 58, 65, and 67). A speaker is moved by the beauty of rural Japan, though here more than in similar Blunden poems of the period diction and syntax have been twisted to fit a meter unmatched to the subject, images are hyperbolic, and rhyme is strained. A morning labourer in a field ‘smiles’ in line 22, for example, and is forced into being ‘The Oriental Giles’ by the end of the stanza. As in The Visitor (26) the poem is an attempt to see Japan as essentially like England. Reprinted in 18, 27, 30, and 162.