A single gesture opens “Hokku 65”: the speaker turns his face aside, deliberately refusing the sight of flowers or leaves. At first the refusal sounds almost contrary—why turn away from beauty? The following lines give an answer of mood, not of logic: it is an autumn evening, and the light is failing. Noguchi offers no explanation beyond that; the averted face suggests a wish not to be reminded of time passing, since flowers and leaves are exactly the things that change and drop away. Yet the rejected images do not disappear. They remain in their absence, and the poem becomes as much about what is not looked at as about what is seen.
The central movement is a shared solitude between the observer and the landscape. The speaker turns away from the small, fragile beauties of the natural world and then notices the “solitary cottage” standing by the sea. The word “How” in that exclamation releases the feeling the earlier lines held back. It is not a shout but a sigh of recognition. The cottage’s loneliness mirrors the speaker’s own posture, standing apart and watching the day decline. In this compressed form, emotion is not explained; it is placed beside an object: the empty house, the wide water, the fading sky.
Form and rhythm support that compression. The first line moves over seven syllables, the second contracts to the brief “Flowers or leaves,” and the next two settle into a quieter five-syllable echo with “‘Tis the autumn eve / With the falling light.” The real acoustic link comes from “see” and “sea,” the homophone placed at the first and last line-ends. That echo makes the poem feel circular: the speaker begins by refusing to see, and the final word, “sea,” suggests the larger thing now in view. The sound of “see” returns, changed, at the very edge of the landscape.
Imagery is built from broad, elemental nouns: flowers, leaves, light, cottage, sea. There are no named colours, no particular plants, no exact weather. That spareness gives the poem a dreamlike generality. “Falling light” is especially suggestive: it names the close of day and half-echoes falling leaves, so the season and the hour blur together. The old-fashioned “‘Tis” adds a songlike, quiet formality, and it keeps the third line taut so the image can work without extra words.
The separated final couplet acts as the poem’s turn. Until that moment the speaker has looked away, withholding attention. Now the voice releases a small exclamation: “How solitary the cottage stands / By the sea!” The shift from the speaker’s face to the panoramic coast enlarges the poem’s scale. It moves from a private gesture to a lonely landscape, and the two halves balance each other. The cottage is the only human-made object in the poem, and its exposed position by the sea makes solitude feel not like a passing mood but like a permanent condition.
What makes the poem significant is how thoroughly it translates the spirit of the hokku into English rather than copying syllable counts mechanically. Noguchi, a Japanese poet writing in English as well as Japanese, works through the form’s essential economy: a seasonal moment, a few clear images, and a turn of feeling. The poem asks readers to notice both the scene and the act of seeing—and refusing to see. In a handful of lines it moves from resistance to recognition, from flowers and leaves to sea and fading light, from the self to a landscape that answers its mood. That restraint is its power.