Frank Oliver Call, a Canadian poet and professor at Bishop’s University, published his sequence Japanese Love-Songs in the 1920 collection Acanthus and Wild Grape. He was writing at a moment when Canadian poetry was beginning to shake off Victorian ornament, and like many early modernists he looked toward Japanese art for brevity, sensory clarity, and emotional restraint. The fifth song in the sequence consists of only three short lines, but its quiet surface holds an entire drama of longing.
The poem begins with two sentence fragments that create a hush before anything happens. “Hush of night” and “Perfumed breath of night” replace full syntax with pure sensory impression: first sound, then smell. The repeated word “night” acts as a soft echo, while “perfumed breath” gives the darkness a living, intimate presence. The line does not describe a landscape; it places the reader inside an atmosphere, close enough to feel the night exhale.
Then the poem shifts from atmosphere to a startling image: “A moth with flaming wings.” The adjective “flaming” does more than describe color. It connects the moth to fire, danger, and attraction — the classic image of a moth drawn toward a flame. In a love song, that image becomes an emblem of desire itself: something beautiful, brief, and potentially self-destructive. The moth is not simply observed; it seems to burn as it moves through the perfumed dark.
The final line, “Come beloved,” turns the preceding images into an invitation. The imperative is tender but urgent, and because it follows the moth’s flaming wings, it carries a hint of risk. The speaker does not explain the beloved’s absence or promise safety. Instead, the poem leaves the reader with a call suspended in the night. The word “beloved” is the only direct address, and it arrives after the impersonal imagery, so it lands with unusual force.
Call constructs the poem without regular meter or rhyme. The rhythm tightens as the lines shorten: the first line is the longest, the second line shorter, the third line only two words. The movement feels like a gradual narrowing of focus, from vast night to single moth to intimate command. Punctuation does a great deal of work. Periods after “night” and “wings” create stillness, while the lack of punctuation after “beloved” leaves the invitation open. The repeated n and m sounds in “night,” “perfumed,” “moth,” and “flaming” murmur through the lines, giving the poem a hushed, incantatory texture.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to say too much. In an era when love poetry often relied on elaborate comparisons and formal rhetoric, Call reduces the love song to three gestures: atmosphere, symbol, address. He borrows from Japanese forms such as the haiku and tanka, not by copying syllable counts, but by adopting their aesthetic of compression and suggestion. The result feels modern because it trusts the reader to complete the emotional picture. The moth with flaming wings may be the speaker, the beloved, or desire itself; the poem allows all three possibilities to shimmer at once.
The miniature also reveals a cross-cultural moment in Canadian modernism. Call, like other early twentieth-century poets, found in Japanese poetry a way to escape heavy Victorian decoration and reach for something cleaner and more direct. Yet the poem is not an imitation. Its overt sensuality and direct imperative belong to a Western love lyric, while its brevity and imagistic focus come from Japanese aesthetics. That fusion gives “Japanese Love-Songs 5” its quiet power. In only a few words, Call captures love as a night that whispers, a flame that attracts, and a voice that dares to call.