Abstract

This study provides a comparative analysis of two modern poems, Kage no Michiyuki and Ying Dao Xing, each of which uses classical Japanese and Chinese poetic idioms to imagine the journey through shadow toward indeterminate light. Composed in different languages and cultural contexts, the poems overlap in their symbolic vocabulary provided by twilight, divine withdrawal, and the lone moral agent. Drawing on symbolic and aesthetic analysis, this paper aims to examine in what way each poem builds up its world of shadow, how spiritual presence appears or is obscured, and how its protagonist reacts to ambiguity. The Japanese poem speaks for emotional refinement and nuances of atmosphere, together with the silent approximation of fate, while the Chinese poem offers a more cosmic vision, one that is rooted in the clarity of morality and cosmic resonance. By setting these works beside one another, the study discloses a shared East Asian grammar of twilight that underpins divergent emotional and philosophical orientations. Convergence and divergence are displayed equally well in the comparison, highlighting both how common symbols can yield different modalities of meaning without erasing cultural specificity.