Sakutarō Hagiwara Quotes

I think of a mystery hard to solve
universal life's instinct's solitary
eternally eternally solitary a sentiment ever so flowery.

Sometimes I escape from everyone and become solitary.
And my heart loving everyone becomes tearful.
I always like, while walking on a deserted lonely beach,
to think of the crowds in the distant city.

When I think of poetry, I feel its fierce human suffering and its joy.

Poetry is the intellect's product of one second. A certain type of sentiment that one ordinarily has touches something like electricity and for the first time discovers a rhythm. This electricity is, for the poet, a miracle. Poetry is not something anticipated and made.

Here and there, I see farmers' melancholy faces.
The faces are dark, looking only at the ground.
On the ground, spring, like smallpox, is ponderously
erupting.

The human lodges collapsed on the ground
are asleep like huge spiders.
In lonely pitch-dark nature
animals tremble with fear
and threatened by some Dream Demon
are howling sadly pale.

Darkness is like waves. On the surface of the sea where life is desolate, they roll in and break, break and roll in again. Ah waves of lust, waves of will, waves of evil thoughts that roll out and rise again. Waves, waves, waves, waves, waves of dark melancholy with nothing special to be said about it. Indeed, this lonely view always repeats its depressingly monotonous echoes on the dark surface of the sea under a cloudy sky. Let us then pass by the seashore, let us go step on the footprints on the dunes that recede into the distance. Let us meditate on the eternal time of nature, of the ocean, that reflects in the Buddha's lonely clock. Now on the surface of the crepuscular sea, watching the whitish waves of darkness that roll in and break, break and roll in again. Hearts on the beach where everything is so sad, crumbling with melancholy.

Why can't one love with one's body those whom one loves with one's heart?

Poetry is neither a mystery nor a symbol nor a demon. Poetry is nothing more than a lonely consolation for the owner of a sickly soul and a man of solitude.

In a field where bats swarmed
I watched a pillar of crumbling flesh
it trembled lonely in the evening darkness
smelled raw like dead-man's-grass that flutters at a shadow
and was as ugly as rotting meat with throngs of maggots crawling on it.