ARTICLES
MIKI Rofu Inspired by William Blake:
A Variation on Songs of Innocence and of Experience
2010 Volume 53 Pages 7-20
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2010 Volume 53 Pages 7-20
It is now accepted that Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience represents the ‘two contrary states of the human soul' in terms of a dualistic system of Innocence and Experience. When Japanese poets began to write under the influences of Blake in the 1900s, however, they often gathered only rhetoric and motifs from Blake's poems, showing little interest in his philosophy of contraries.
An example is to be seen in ‘Yameru Sobi' or ‘The Sick Rose'(1908, collected in Haien or The Deserted Garden in 1909) written by MIKI Rofu (1889-1964), a Japanese poet of symbolism who was inspired by Arthur Symons and W. B. Yeats as well as Paul Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire. Saying that ‘a symbol is a window of a soul' and that ‘the best poet is a seer of eternity', MIKI Rofu explored for something immortal through his poetry but, unlike William Blake (1757-1827), he finally found spiritual ease by working in a Trappist monastery in Hokkaido and lived a Catholic life after he returned to Tokyo in 1924.
It is most likely that Blake was introduced to Japan and disintegrated through two different channels: people of literature and those of philosophy. This essay discusses the relationship between Blake and MIKI Rofu, a case study of the former channel.
