BD. Edmund Blunden

14. Edmund Blunden, His Professorship and His Writings: Appreciations, by Some of His Students and Friends. Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1927.

‘Selected poems’ by Blunden and fulsome appreciations (in Japanese) of his teaching by his students at Tokyo Imperial University before his return to Britain in July 1927. Reprints The Daimyo’s Pond (1b).

	Reprinted in Japanese Garland and Near and Far.

a. Eastern Tempest. A facsimile of Blunden’s manuscript dated 1926. Description of a typhoon in an urgent metrical-rhetorical structure that befits the subject, though end rhyme is occasionally strained. Kiri (l. 12): paulownia. Appeared first in †Study of English (Tokyo Imperial University) in June 1927; reprinted in 18, 27, and 30.

b. Trust. The lines examine the nature of trust by describing a ‘petticoated child’ who ‘Bids some great dog begone out of his path’; they do not rely on figures noticeably related to Japan, but in a note Blunden says the poem ‘was suggested by things seen in Tokyo’. Reprinted in Retreat (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1928) and in 30.