Japanese primitive song also was preserved in the form of ancient ritual prayers (norito-goto), divinely imparted magic words spoken in a sacred place. Primitive norito were thought to have been the words of the Shinto gods and spirits (kami). With the development of court ritual, however, they became prayers from men spoken in worship of the gods, that is, as prayers of petition, mystical and powerful incantations, and blessings to insure longevity.
By the mid-seventh century, Japanese poetry had come to be composed in a pattern of alternating five-and seven-syllable phrases. In the seventh and eighth centuries, the two major forms of verse were the choka or nagauta (long poem) and the tanka (short poem), both of which were considered to be waka ("Japanese" poetry as distinct from Chinese poetry). The choka was made up of an indefinite number of pairs of five-and seven-syllable lines, ending with an additional seven-syllable line, while the tanka had just thirty-one syllables in the pattern 5-7-5-7-7. In later ages the word waka was used to denote this form only, for the choka, although well represented in the oldest extant poetry anthology, the Man'yoshu (c.
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