🧚 Shintō Revery

_Mad waves devour The rocks: I ask myself in the darkness, “Have I become a god?”1 Dim is The night and wild!2

“Have I become a god?”—that is to say, “Have I died?—am I only a ghost in this desolation?”3 The dead, becoming _kami_ or gods, are thought to haunt wild solitudes by preference.4

IV5

The poems above rendered are more than pictorial: they suggest something of emotion or sentiment.6 But there are thousands of pictorial poems that do not; and these would seem mere insipidities to a reader ignorant of their true purpose.7 When you learn that some exquisite text of gold means only, “_Evening-sunlight on the wings of the water-fowl_,”—or,”_Now in my garden the flowers bloom, and the butterflies dance_,”—then your first interest in decorative poetry is apt to wither away.8 Yet these little texts have a very real merit of their own, and an intimate relation to Japanese aesthetic feeling and experience.9 Like the pictures upon screens and fans and cups, they give pleasure by recalling impressions of nature, by reviving happy incidents of travel or pilgrimage, by evoking the memory of beautiful days.10 And when this plain fact is fully understood, the persistent attachment of modern Japanese poets—notwithstanding their University training—to the ancient poetical methods, will be found reasonable enough.11

I need offer only a very few specimens of the purely pictorial poetry.12 The following—mere thumb-nail sketches in verse—are of recent date.13

LONESOMENESS14

Furu-dera ya: Kané mono iwazu; Sakura chiru.15

—“_Old temple: bell voiceless; cherry-flowers fall_.”16