BD. Edmund Blunden

40. The Cottage at Chigasaki. Now and Then, Summer 1933, p. 25.

	Reprinted in Choice or Chance and Poems 1930-1049.

Of Blunden’s dozens of poems on Japanese subjects the only clear allusion to a particular Japanese poem is here, in an extended reference to a famous hokku by Chiyo (1703-75), asagao ni / tsurube torarete / moraimizu, ‘With the well bucket / taken over by morning glories— / I go begging water’. Chigasaki is an industrial suburb of Tokyo and Yokohama, but in Blunden’s early years in Japan was a quiet retreat from the metropolis. Okada (191) suggests that the poem was written at a cottage owned by Keio University professor Hori Eishirô. Reprinted in 41, 50, 125, 157, and 163.