Haiku: The Unwritten Feelings

What is Haiku? Three-line Japanese nature poem. Haiku are 17 morae long and contain both a kigo and a kireji. But there’s much more to haiku than just counting syllables, no matter what your 3rd Grade teacher may have told you. Haiku is the most sophisticated and subtle form of Japanese verse.

Poetic Spirit Matsuo Basho is the most famous and influential haiku poet. Basho on the poetic spirit: “…the poetic spirit, the spirit that leads one to follow the ways of the universe and become a friend with things of the seasons. For a person who has the spirit, everything he sees becomes a flower, and everything he imagines turns into a moon. Those who do not see the flower are no different from barbarians, and those who do not imagine the flower are akin to the beasts.Leave barbarians and beasts behind; follow the ways of the universe and return to nature.” Appreciation of beauty makes us human. The poetic spirit derives understanding from the creative spirit of the universe: nature.

Nature Nature is the soul of the haiku. Basho: “Learn about a pine tree from a pine tree, and about a bamboo from a bamboo.” Doho: “…enter into the object, perceive its delicate life, and feel its feeling, whereupon the poem writes itself.” Haiku seeks to express nature in nature’s own terms. Basho: “Attain a high level of enlightenment and return to the world of common men.” Haiku sees the extraordinary in everyday things.

Terms Japanese doesn’t accent syllables, but it does have a steady rhythm. Each beat is called a mora. There are 17 morae in a haiku. Morae are short: the word “haiku” contains two syllables, but three morae. Kigo—means “season word.” A kigo can be the name of the season or a plant, animal, sound, or color symbolic of that season.

Compression Because it is so short, haiku must suggest much more than it says. “It is a poem with a middle only; its beginning lies in the poet's actual experience, and its end, if any, has to be sought in the reader's mind. It is a piece of life captured verbally.” Yosano Akiko “The haiku that reveals 70-80% of its subject is good. Those that reveal % we never tire of.” Basho

Kireji Kireji—is the “cutting word.” It indicates a pause, a shift of meaning. The koreji often takes the place of a verb. This creates uncertainty, ambiguity, and layers of possible meaning (shiori). This uncertain feeling helps make the poem universal, although it uses very specific images. The two parts of the poem must be connected by the reader’s mind. The reader really completes the poem. The emotion is part of the reader’s discovery. Juxtaposing two images and letting the reader make the connection is also how metaphor works.

“Whilst they may be written in simple words, there is a certain weightiness, an expansiveness, about such poems. This is not really due to the interweaving of multiple meanings, nor is it because a given topic may be employed as a symbol of something else. Rather it is the result of the complex emotions lying behind the poems, which are often unexpressed in, even deliberately omitted from, the composed work. It may well be these unwritten feelings, rather than the overt content or the charming sound of the poet’s words, which have the power to fascinate the reader…”Manaka Tomohisa

Sabishi and humor are two emotions often evoked by haiku. Sabishi: Loneliness, but an impersonal loneliness. The loneliness of the desert or a faraway star.It moves beyond personal emotion to the emotion of nature. Nature is bigger than man. Nature-sized emotion is often referred to as “the sublime.” Loneliness is our most natural state. We all die alone. As Kurt Cobain wrote, “all alone is all we are.” Basho: Loneliness— Standing amid the blossoms, A cypress tree. Humor: often the contrast between images in a haiku will be humorous. Humor also moves us beyond personal emotion into a more detached, big-picture view. Emotion

Books Basho On Love and Barley—Haiku of Basho Penguin Classics: New York 1985 Delay, Nelly Art and Culture of Japan Abrams: New York 1999 Hamill, Sam and Seaton, JP, eds. The Poetry of Zen Shambhala: Berkeley, CA 2007 Hume, Nancy, ed. Japanese Aesthetics and Culture: A Reader State University of New York Press: Albany 1995 Murphy, Rhoads East Asia 4 th Edition Longman 2006 Time-Life Books What Life Was Like Among Samurai and Shoguns Time-Life Books: Alexandria, VA 1999 Web Frantisek Staud Photography Matsuo Basho: Frog Haiku: Bureau of Public Secrets Simply Haiku: A Quarterly Journal of Japanese Short Form Poetry, Summer Sources