Quotations and Literature Forum

There is an ancient poem that reads:

From hill to hill no bird in flight,
From path to path no man in sight.
A lonely fisherman afloat
Is fishing snow in lonely boat.

In this poem, although loneliness is stressed by the repetition of such words as no bird, no man, such images linger in the readers' mind and also in the mind of the lonely fisherman. Aware of the existence of other people and other creatures, the lonely hermit tries to fish "snow" in the vast screen of falling flakes linking the river and the sky.

What is your idea?

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A reed is more than a reed when it thinks.

Are you saying that even thoughthe poem says 'no bird' that the image of 'bird' persists in the reader's mind through the use of the word?

Because that's not what happens in my mind.

As i read:
From hill to hill no bird in flight,
From path to path no man in sight.

I see hills. Barren hills, dusty until a later line layers them in snow. Empty paths crossing back and forth, stringing into the distance. I 'note' the lack of man or bird, but no such image lingers.
I sense quiet. The softened muffling of a deep fog. The total lack of participant actually caused me to imagine the scene from a disembodied point of view. My presence would have violated the emptiness.

When the fisherman was added, the lonliness had a focus, but it was still something apart from me. I was more aware of the silence, of a scene being almost on 'pause' than of any putative birds or people elsewhere.