The poet, Michio MADO, was awarded the International ANDERSEN Prize in 1944. He wrote about thirty poems on the motif of the "rainbow". One of them entitled Rainbow is as follows: Rainbow, / Rainbow, / Rainbow! / Mommy, / Sit / Just below it, / And give Baby / Your breast, please! In this short poem, it seems that we find the motif of Madonna (or Virgin) and Child, especially that of Maria lactans (or Madonna del latte). But we do not want to insist that it was written in response to a certain painting created in the European tradition of Christian art.
We tried to analyze various paintings on the motif of Maria lactans created by such artists as Van EYCK, WEYDEN, CAMPIN, DURER, RUBENS, Da VINCI, GIORGIONE, BOTTICELLI, RAFFAELLO and El GRECO. We rarely find the paintings of the Madonna and Child with a Rainbow. However, they exist. For example, Madonna di Foligno by RAFFAELLO, though unfortunately, Madonna here does not breast-feed the Child. We are able to see an affinity between the poem Rainbow of Michio MADO and the works of these European artists.
Furthermore, we can note, in another MADO poem Sui-mitsu-tô (Water-honey-peach, i. e. a succulent and very sweet peach), how the poet symbolyzes the Promised Land (Canaan) by using the image of eating the succulent peach. There are striking parallels with the baby sucking at his mother's breast in the embrace of a rainbow.
Through our analysis of various poems by MADO on the motif of the "rainbow" in which we are able to see a spontaneous similarity among the several senses (synesthesia), we can conclude that for the poet, the cosmos itself is music, indeed sacred music. Another poem also entitled Rainbow illustrates this idea.
All the colors / Together are / Playing music. / Ah, lovely / It sounds / Like a hymn / From the heart of the heavens.
The poetry of this Christian, Michio MADO is nothing short of a hymn in praise of the immense, living cosmos and of the God who orchestrates and harmonizes it.