Shintō Revelry
Mad waves devour the rocks: I ask myself in the darkness,
“Have I become a god?” Dim is the night and wild!
“Have I become a god?”—that is to say, “Have I died?—am I only a ghost in this desolation?” The dead, becoming kami or gods, are thought to haunt wild solitudes by preference.
IV
The poems above rendered are more than pictorial: they suggest something of emotion or sentiment. But there are thousands of pictorial poems that do not; and these would seem mere insipidities to a reader ignorant of their true purpose. 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. Yet these little texts have a very real merit of their own, and an intimate relation to Japanese æsthetic feeling and experience. Like the pictures upon screens and fans and cups, they
