Yone Noguchi’s “Fantasia” reads less like a scene than a spell for making a world from fragments. Its first line names the raw matter of a dwelling — “bits of straw and clay and woman’s hair” — and the archaic “shall be builded” turns the building into ritual. The speaker does not want shelter in any ordinary sense; the cry “Oh to lose the world and gain a song!” proposes a trade: give up solid reality, receive a made thing. That song becomes the real house. Clouds may drift through the window on the left, dancers pour in from the right “as a tide,” and the poem arranges these movements like a stage where inner and outer, air and flesh, meet without walls.
What enters is not comfortable; the dancers are “shapeless in pain and pride,” and the spirit they wake is “sick in joy.” Those bare adjectives — shapeless, sick — keep beauty from becoming decorative. The ecstatic and the wounded arrive together. The speaker then claims a startling power: “I’ll sing a song that makes the seas the hills.” The line does not explain how song alters geography; it simply performs a collision of large natural things, as if song could fold the world into new proportions. The parenthesis that follows is the poem’s sharpest claim: “Morality begins, I am afraid, where I stop my song.” Art, here, is not immoral but outside morality, a space with different laws. “I am afraid” complicates the boast; the speaker half-regards the boundary with unease, not triumph.
After the house, the second movement turns toward burial. “Rags to roll me in, pieces of dream” answer the first stanza’s straw and clay. The materials are again poor, intimate, chosen. With a “heart of nocturnal fear,” the speaker still has “choice of the sky red in memory and art.” That red sky is deliberately selected, as if even fear can be composed. The command “Let the stars fall in the garden rose” shrinks the cosmic to the domestic; a falling star becomes something a rose can receive. In the final lines, “the leaves and my souls in a thousand guises / hurry to the ground to build a grave.” The plural “souls” undoes any single self, scattering identity into many forms, each falling like a leaf. What the first stanza built as a house, the second rebuilds as a grave. Creation and mortality use the same materials.
The form of “Fantasia” matches its title. A fantasia is a free musical composition, and the poem avoids regular rhyme and fixed stanza shape; its music comes from echoes of sound and idea — hair and fear, pride and tide, dream and memory — and from the pressure of paired opposites: left and right, pain and pride, seas and hills, house and grave. The two verse paragraphs do not battle; they lean on each other, the second answering the first almost line for line. The first stanza opens a permeable room; the second lets it fall. This is not pessimism exactly, because both acts — building and burying — are forms of making. The speaker is the builder throughout, singing the grave as deliberately as the house.
What makes “Fantasia” linger is its refusal to apologize for art’s amoral power. Noguchi’s speaker treats a song as a dwelling that can hold contradiction: pain and pride, fear and choice, sea and hill, life and death. The poem does not describe that house from outside; it assembles it on the page, using fragments that most structures would reject. That assembly is fragile, and the final grave makes clear that song cannot defeat mortality. But the song can give mortality a shape, a rhythm, a red sky from memory and art. The world is lost, as the opening wished, and what is gained is not safety but a made thing rich enough to live inside, then to fall with.