LiederNet logo

CONTENTS

×
  • Home | Introduction
  • Composers (20,139)
  • Text Authors (19,552)
  • Go to a Random Text
  • What’s New
  • A Small Tour
  • FAQ & Links
  • Donors
  • DONATE

UTILITIES

  • Search Everything
  • Search by Surname
  • Search by Title or First Line
  • Search by Year
  • Search by Collection

CREDITS

  • Emily Ezust
  • Contributors (1,114)
  • Contact Information
  • Bibliography

  • Copyright Statement
  • Privacy Policy

Follow us on Facebook

by Frederick Herman Martens (1874 - 1932)

The bell of Dōjōji
Language: English 
Anchin the monk, beside the marshy pool, 
Met Kiyohime, the lady merciless.
She smiled and touched his rosary.
At her caress
His vows were all unsaid, and she, his heart did rule. 
Vainly he prayed in shaded cloister hall,
To be delivered from her hateful spell;
With poppies crowned she entered in his moonlit cell. 
He fled into the night, yet she pursued her thrall. 
Vainly he won Dōjōji’s temples shrine,
Beneath its bell of bronze a refuge sought;
For Kiyohime the bell-rope cut.
The monk was caught!
While o’er the bell she crept like some lithe, clinging vine. 
Her green robe gli0’ring into golden scales,
She turned a fearsome dragon, breathing fire;
The bronze bell red-hot glowed, lashed by her tail in ire, 
Ere died away poor Anchin’s piteous cries and wails.

Text Authorship:

  • by Frederick Herman Martens (1874 - 1932) [author's text not yet checked against a primary source]

Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive):

  • by Kōsaku Yamada (1886 - 1965), "The bell of Dōjōji", first performed 1918 [ voice and piano or orchestra ], from Two Legendary Poems of Old Japan, no. 1 [sung text checked 1 time]

Researcher for this page: Joost van der Linden [Guest Editor]

This text was added to the website: 2022-12-30
Line count: 18
Word count: 133

Gentle Reminder

This website began in 1995 as a personal project by Emily Ezust, who has been working on it full-time without a salary since 2008. Our research has never had any government or institutional funding, so if you found the information here useful, please consider making a donation. Your help is greatly appreciated!
–Emily Ezust, Founder

Donate

We use cookies for internal analytics and to earn much-needed advertising revenue. (Did you know you can help support us by turning off ad-blockers?) To learn more, see our Privacy Policy. To learn how to opt out of cookies, please visit this site.

I acknowledge the use of cookies

Contact
Copyright
Privacy

Copyright © 2025 The LiederNet Archive

Site redesign by Shawn Thuris