BD. Edmund Blunden

45. A Song. Fortnightly NS 138 (September 1935): 338.

	Reprinted in Poems 1930-1940 and A Tribute from Japan.

When the speaker was a boy in England a shopkeeper on his street pointed to clouds on the eastern horizon and said, ‘See Japan’. The poem describes what of ‘Japan’ the boy could and could not see. Saitô (185a) recalls Blunden telling him that the shopkeeper’s words were ‘a fact . . . not a poetic fancy’. Reprinted as Looking Eastward in An Elegy and Other Poems (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1937), and in 50 and 165.