---
title: Shintō Revery — In Ghostly Japan · full text with trees
description: Shintō Revery, «In Ghostly Japan» by Lafcadio Hearn: the whole chapter, every sentence with its dependency tree and pragmatics. It begins: _Mad waves devour The rocks: I ask myself in the darkness, “Have I become a god?”
---

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# Shintō Revery

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Shintō Revery of «In Ghostly Japan» by Lafcadio Hearn: the whole text, 16 sentences and 264 words. The small number after every sentence leads to its own page with its syntax tree and pragmatics, parsed by Mova itself.

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\_Mad waves devour The rocks: I ask myself in the darkness, “Have I become a god?”[1](1/ "tree and pragmatics") Dim is The night and wild\![2](2/ "tree and pragmatics")

“Have I become a god?”—that is to say, “Have I died?—am I only a ghost in this desolation?”[3](3/ "tree and pragmatics") The dead, becoming \_kami\_ or gods, are thought to haunt wild solitudes by preference.[4](4/ "tree and pragmatics")

IV[5](5/ "tree and pragmatics")

The poems above rendered are more than pictorial: they suggest something of emotion or sentiment.[6](6/ "tree and pragmatics") 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](7/ "tree and pragmatics") 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](8/ "tree and pragmatics") Yet these little texts have a very real merit of their own, and an intimate relation to Japanese aesthetic feeling and experience.[9](9/ "tree and pragmatics") 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](10/ "tree and pragmatics") 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](11/ "tree and pragmatics")

I need offer only a very few specimens of the purely pictorial poetry.[12](12/ "tree and pragmatics") The following—mere thumb-nail sketches in verse—are of recent date.[13](13/ "tree and pragmatics")

LONESOMENESS[14](14/ "tree and pragmatics")

Furu-dera ya: Kané mono iwazu; Sakura chiru.[15](15/ "tree and pragmatics")

—“\_Old temple: bell voiceless; cherry-flowers fall\_.”[16](16/ "tree and pragmatics")

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- ← previous: [Sublimity of Intellectual Power](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg8128/22/)
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