i have no idea how this comes in but..
Tsurayuki ended his preface to the Kokinshu with these
words:
Hitomaro is gone. His poetry remains. Time may pass, and seasons
change; pleasure and pain may come and go. These poems, written,
stand!
As the long thread-like leaves of the willow, forever renewed; as
the needles of the pine, eternally green; as the tendrils of
creeers that cover the fields in the endless profusion; as
bird-tracks that multiply in the sand by the sea-shares of time:
even so Poetry shall forever last. And men who know its form and
feature, and who understand its heart, will worship the poetry of
old even as we do the moon in the wide heaven; but will not fail to
love as well the poetry of today.
