Only the pitiful husk!… O poor singer of summer,
Wherefore thus consume all thy body in song?
SUBLIMITY OF INTELLECTUAL POWER
The mind that, undimmed, absorbs the foul and the pure together—
Call it rather a sea one thousand fathoms deep![[4]]
[4] This is quite novel in its way,—a product of the University: the original runs thus:—
Nigoréru mo
Suméru mo tomo ni
Iruru koso
Chi-hiro no umi no
Kokoro nari-keré!
SHINTŌ REVERY
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 aesthetic feeling and experience. 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. 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.