Yone Noguchi’s “Right and Left” is a quietly insistent meditation on balance. The title seems to promise a simple opposition, yet the poem’s real subject is the space between the two. The speaker observes a world split into right and left, then, in the final stanza, chooses a third path. The central idea is not that one side must be rejected, but that fullness lies in the connecting road.
The poem is built from four three-line stanzas. The first three work like variations on a single template: a coloured image on one side, another on the other, and a laughing presence passing through the middle. “The mountain green at my right : / The sunlight yellow at my left : / The laughing winds pass between.” The colons are not just punctuation; they are hinges. Each side is held apart long enough to be seen, then the middle line releases the held breath with a verb of motion—winds pass, girls go, the moon appears. There is no regular rhyme scheme to hold the poem together; instead, its music comes from the repetition of “at my right” and “at my left”, and from the soft return of “between” at each stanza’s close. The earlier “between” lines end with commas, so the poem keeps moving forward; only the final stanza closes with a full stop, arriving at Home.
The imagery is deliberately simple and visual. Green mountains, yellow sunlight, a white river, red flowers, clouds, birds, the moon: these are elemental things, named almost without description beyond colour and direction. The right and left sides do not stay morally fixed. In the first stanza green is on the right and yellow on the left; in the second white is on the left and red on the right. The poem refuses to make one side good and the other bad. Each side is lovely, but each is also partial. What gives the poem its odd energy is the word “laughing.” It attaches to the wind, the girls, and the moon, the beings that inhabit the between. The wind is invisible, the girls are human and alive, the moon appears rather than stays. None of them is pinned to right or left. Their laughter suggests that the middle is not a dull compromise but the place of movement, play, and change. The speaker, by contrast, stands at first as an observer, taking in both directions.
The final stanza breaks the established pattern. The speaker becomes an actor: “I turned left to the dale of poem ; / I turned right to the forest of Love : / But I hurry Home by the road between.” Here the two sides are named as abstract destinations—poetry on one hand, love on the other. The capitalised “Love” and the final capitalised “Home” give the choice a quiet gravity. Yet the crucial word is “But.” After turning to both, the speaker refuses to be claimed by either. The road between is not a failure to choose; it is the choice of wholeness, of returning to a centre where both poem and love might be carried rather than worshipped as separate places.
The significance of “Right and Left” lies in this small, precise wisdom. It does not preach balance; it performs it through structure. The poem’s symmetry, its repeated turns, its brief lines, and its final movement from landscape to self all make a single argument: the most alive place is not at the extremes but along the connecting path. To hurry Home by the road between is to keep both the green mountain and the red flower in view while moving through the middle where laughter happens.