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The muse hung airy as a blimp over Tokyo's Imperial Palace, where a top event of Japan's literary season, the annual poetry party, went into its lyrical finale. Seated before a huge golden screen, Emperor Hirohito and Empress Nagako harkened approvingly to verse by 15 finalists chosen from a record 17,238 entrants trying their hand at the formal 31-syllable waka. Then they listened solemnly while their own poems were read. The imperial family does not compete in the contest itself, this year featuring the subject of "Clouds." Hirohito's effort, read five times:

A white cloud like a sash

Hovers over Nasu peak

Soaring beyond the plateau.

Nagako's waka, read thrice, also lost something in translation:

Changing and rechanging form

The white clouds float

Into the distant blue sky.

Crown Prince Akihito wrote:

Trailing numerous white threads

A rolling cloud drifts

In the open sky.

Next year's subject: "Windows."

For her walkout during an operatic performance in Rome (TIME, Jan. 13), Soprano Maria Meneghini Callas was set down for the Rome opera season. The ban on Manhattan-born Singer Callas came from the implacable Rome opera authorities, who were heartily seconded by Rome's prefecture. Ostensible reason: the mere sight of Maria onstage again might incite Rome's already outraged opera fans to riot.

Benign and serene on a telenquiry program in Chicago, white-maned Conductor Leopold Stokowski, who admits to 70, disclosed that baton-waving gives him both uplift and insomnia: "It's a mystery to me, but one receives enormously something back from the music. It makes me feel strong. After a concert I hear the music all night. I can't sleep that night. All night I hear the music, and I hear the bassoons and the oboes and the different instruments." His view of applause for a performance? "What would you suggest as an alternative to applause? Supposing we had no applause? Then what? I can't understand--after one's heard beautiful music, then you make this noise. But I can't find an alternative."

Exhibiting their persistent disregard of perennial protests by Britain's League Against Cruel Sports, Queen Elizabeth II and Queen Mother Elizabeth journeyed to Westacre, by their presence lent royal sanction to a meet of the West Norfolk Foxhounds. With them, and showing an avid interest in the hill-and-daling of the baying pack, were Princess Anne, in corduroy slacks and polo coat, and Prince Charles.

Festooned with paper streamers that almost gave the scene an air of capitalist merriment, Poland's billiard-bald Premier Josef Cyrankiewicz and his pearl-neck-laced Actress-Wife Nina danced without much abandon. Their restrained revelry did little to heat up a state ball on the first night of this year's Warsaw Carnival.

An author more compulsive about his rights than most, Meyer (Compulsion) Levin, won a verdict for $50,000 damages in a Manhattan court on his contention that he was gypped of credit in the production of Broadway's Pulitzer Prizewinning hit, The Diary of Anne Frank. Not only was it his original idea to turn the young Nazi victim's journal into a play, claimed Levin, but he had already completed a stage adaptation when a switch of producers and writers left him out in the cold. On the losing end of Playwright Levin's suit: Producer Kermit Bloomgarden and Anne's father, Otto Frank, who controlled rights to the book.

Now knocking down about $33,000 a year, onetime Heavyweight Champion Joe Louis happily announced that the U.S. is giving him a break that may eventually lift his private millstone--the $1,250,000 in federal income tax arrears that Joe still owes from 1946-52 (which includes his last prodigal fighting years). Irresponsible as ever with his money, Joe still tosses around cash, keeps no records, no bank accounts, is behind on his taxes for every year since 1953. The reve-nooers have agreed to accept $20,000 a year from Joe as taxes on his current income* and on his recent (since 1953) arrears. Five years hence, if Louis has anted up annually as a solid citizen, the Government may offer him a merciful settlement on the prodigious arrears of his ring days.

When the Civil War was a year old, Kentucky's Warren County grand jury indicted three top soldiers of the Confederacy. Charges: treason and conspiracy. Chief specification: they had invaded border Kentucky and tried to bully her into the Confederate States. The defendants: Major General John C. Breckinridge, onetime (1857-61) Vice President of the U.S. (under President Buchanan) and later Confederate War Secretary; Brigadier General John Hunt Morgan, the famed cavalry raider who escaped from a Union prison in 1863, was killed next year by a Union soldier when cut off from his forces; Lieut. General Simon Bolivar Buckner, who survived the conflict to become governor of Kentucky./- When the war ended, Warren County's records were messed up and nobody could find the indictments. Last November, 95 years after the true bills were handed down, workmen moved an antique filing cabinet from the courthouse in Bowling Green, and the ancient papers popped up. With the indictments at last in hand, a local court last week bestirred itself to formally quash them.

Ever youthful (39 for the past quarter-century) Comedian Jack Benny announced with pained resignation that he will turn 40 on the eve of his 64th birthday next month.

* Annual salaries: $20,000 as a director of the International Boxing Club, $8,200 as a "good will ambassador" for Mercury Records, $4,800 for lending his name (as "public relations director") to Chicago's Joe Louis Milk Co.

/- And to sire Lieut. General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., killed in 1945 on Okinawa.

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