Frank Oliver Call was a Canadian poet and professor, born in 1878, whose work unfolded during a period when Western writers were increasingly drawn to the brevity and suggestiveness of East Asian poetry. Published in his 1920 collection *Acanthus and Wild Grape*, the sequence “Japanese Love-Songs” reflects that cultural encounter. Call spent much of his career teaching modern languages at Bishop’s University, and his writing often moves between European lyric traditions and a quieter, more compressed aesthetic borrowed from Japanese verse. He does not imitate a strict haiku or tanka form, but he captures their essential spirit: a single image, a turn inward, and silence around the edges.
The poem places two observations side by side. The white lotus-flower grows in the depths of the pool, and love grows in the speaker’s heart. Its central idea is that the most powerful feelings often develop out of sight, in the hidden places of the self. The lotus does not rest on the surface; it begins below, rooted in dark water and mud, yet it produces a flower of startling whiteness. Love, likewise, is not presented as a sudden event or a loud declaration. It grows, steadily and naturally, in the heart’s interior. The parallel suggests that love, like the lotus, needs depth, stillness, and time to become what it is.
The construction is as spare as the imagery. There is no end rhyme, and the rhythm is deliberately loose, but the lines are balanced by repetition and syntax. The second and third lines both turn on the word “grows”: “Grows in the depths of the pool” and “Love grows in my heart.” That repetition links the natural world and the emotional world without explaining the comparison. The first line opens with the gentle hush of “white lotus-flower,” the long vowel sounds slowing the reader down. The second line moves more heavily through “depths” and “pool,” anchoring the image in stillness. The final line lands on “heart,” a simple word made resonant by its position and by the quiet music of the previous lines.
Key words carry much of the poem’s weight. “White” is not merely decorative; it suggests purity, clarity, and perhaps spiritual awakening. The “lotus-flower” has a long history in Asian traditions as a symbol of enlightenment rising from murky water, and Call borrows that resonance without explanation. “Depths” insists that the flower’s origin is concealed, not visible to a casual observer. The word “pool” deepens that idea, evoking stillness, reflection, and contained water rather than a rushing stream. When the poem shifts inward to “my heart,” it moves from an external image to an intimate confession. The speaker does not say that love is like a lotus; the parallel structure allows the two statements to complete each other.
What makes this poem significant is its compression and cross-cultural grace. In three short lines Call brings Japanese aesthetic restraint into English lyric feeling, trusting the image to do the work. The result feels strikingly modern, an early Canadian example of the Imagist principle that an image can convey emotion directly, without elaborate explanation. The poem asks readers to pause, look below the surface, and recognize that what grows in darkness may become the most luminous thing of all.