15/15 - family haikai

There's a problem loading this menu right now. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping. Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon.

Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally. Amazon Inspire Digital Educational Resources. Amazon Rapids Fun stories for kids on the go. Amazon Restaurants Food delivery from local restaurants. ComiXology Thousands of Digital Comics. East Dane Designer Men's Fashion. That is to say, he cannot interject anything of his personal or egoistic needs between himself and the experience; and it is interesting to note that Japanese critics and poets are most insistent upon the importance of this point.

Again the verse of some is over-ambitious and loses its sincerity. When one is joyful and immersed in happiness, that feeling cannot produce a haiku. Such feel- ings as joy, anger, sadness or delight are subjective and are merely another form of subjectivism. When a person is interested and involved in the object for its own sake, then, a haiku attitude is formed.

It is therefore said that a haiku attitude is a state of readiness for an experi- ence which can be aesthetic. Without such an attitude it is impossible to have an aesthetic experience. However, the rela- tionship between the attitude and the experience is not causative; when a person with a haiku attitude looks at an object, he does not necessarily have an aesthetic experience. Therefore I call it a state of readiness, of receptivity. But a man actually drunken would have to use art to conceal his condition if he is not to disgust his audience.

If it is not single-minded—i. To clarify this point, let us remember that both the farmer and the entomologist related to the dragonfly; the act was casual, fleeting, and did not involve them in any serious manner. What is meant here by single-mindedness will be explored in the following section. Here the ques- tion arises as to the nature of the aesthetic experience which has been characterized above as being among other things, single-minded. By this is meant that during such an experience the observer has no awareness of himself as separate from what he sees or hears, from what he is experiencing.

This is what is implied when it is said that one goes into the heart of created things and becomes one with nature. It is an experiencing of what, in being itself, the object is, so that it becomes unique. It is, as Croce has maintained, an experienc- ing of the quality of the object. The form of the crow, as Basho— saw it, is the crow. Experience then is always the interaction of a man and his environment. They are convenient tools to distinguish aspects of a whole, to deal with its parts, and to analyze it.

They are useful terms, as long as it is remembered that, in the aesthetic experience, the subject cannot exist with- out the object, nor the object without the subject, since they are one. The haiku composed under this condition transcend what we call the subjective or objective attitude. That is to say, not all objects speak to an artist, inviting contemplation and absorption into an experience. As Dewey has observed, they cannot face this scene with no interests and attitudes, with no meanings and values drawn from their prior experience; he goes on to say: They cannot vanish and yet the artist continue to see an object.

The poet today then. But concrete experience has meaning,—indeed, it has form, has existence— only in terms of values. Due to the histor- ical associations around words such as subject and object, or form and content, the English words them- selves seem immediately to suggest separate entities rather than distinguishable aspects of a whole. Wherever these terms occur hereafter, they are to be understood as defined in the text.

We contribute a part of the meaning. We interpret even as we see, not simply after we have seen. Awareness is a dynamic and purposeful activity. The research of which we speak does not concern the superficial but the profound character of the man; it is not concerned with the congealed and solidified stratum [e. Presuppositions are the philosophemes that everyone carries with him, gathering them from the times and from tradition, or forming them anew by means of his observations and rapid reflections.

In poetical works, they form the condition remote from the psychological attitude, which generates poetical visions. Why the artist contemplates this aspect of his environment rather than that is not his concern. Indeed, he is not com- pletely free in the choice. He is solely interested in experienc- ing the object that does present itself, in and for itself. When he contemplates a scene, in virtue of his funded experience, any object that has meaning resonatory enough to respond to and answer the impulsion generated in him becomes his sub- ject.

He becomes so aware of it that his self is that awareness; he does not reflect on it. He is like a tuning fork placed before a vibrating one of the same frequency. When he contemplates the impassionate, living object he immediately realizes its quality just as the sound from the tuning forks will become audible. He is in a state of aesthetic resonation, a harmonized whole of all the meaningful experiences he has had, brought to bear upon the moment of aesthetic contemplation. Every man, poet or not, as Dewey remarks, possesses a funded experience through which his insights are indeed his own: This is fatal for the poet, as poet.

His perceptions can become sharp only as his funded experience becomes easily available to him, as he strives to be sincere, to be devoted single- mindedly to the realization that is his. Bradley has shown the comic implications of evaluating art by direct reference to other values: If we [determine the intrinsic value of poetry by direct reference to other human values] we shall find ourselves maintaining what we did not expect.

They can result in sheer sentimentality, as Cleanth Brooks declares: It is the sincerity of the conscientious expositor who makes his point, even at the price of suppressions and exclusions. Poetry which embodies such a conception of sincer- ity, when it is unsuccessful, has as its characteristic vice, sentimentality. For sentimentality nearly always involves an over-simplification of the experience in question.

The second conception of sincerity. The poet attempts to fuse the conflicting elements in a harmonious whole. For aside from the necessity of rejecting the claims coming from without the area of art, the poet must also be sincere in his own artistic practice: Everywhere in his writing he uses the word makoto. This term is used in various ways and its meaning is not fixed. However, he uses this term in the sense of sincerity.

Rather it is the experience, which is unique if it is truly his and which it is his function to grasp. His concern was to grasp the intuition. In the life of a haiku poet, his attitudes from day to day were very important. The attitude of the haiku poet is to find the way of art in the common modes of living.

One of the outstanding characteristics of Basho— is that life and art are in perfect harmony. In his work, art is the expression of the whole man, and in it, the whole man was able to emerge in the art. Students of art have also tended to feel that the matter lay outside of their area, which is perhaps another instance of the fragmentation of learning in the West.

As Allen Tate makes clear, however, there is an awareness of a connection between literary practice and the problems of morality: It is a moral problem, but that phase I cannot touch here. When Onitsura states that without truth there is no haiku, he is not referring to actual truth, but rather to what something, actual or not, is. The true in the sense of the actual is not what the artist presents. He wrote the following haiku on the seashore of Kuwana: Fallen snows are light, And the lancelets appear No more than an inch white. This is factual, not the poetic truth that Basho— was seeking.

For in composing the poem, he was too much bound by factual truth and failed to grasp a deep insight of what it was that he saw, actual or not. Of course I do not mean by this that the factual is not important, but rather that, through factual truth, the poet can realize poetic truth. Basho— , apparently feeling some dissatisfaction with the above version, perhaps along some such line of reasoning as that pre- sented, later changed the poem to read: In the dawn twilight There the lancelets appear No more than an inch white.

However, it is poetic truth, of the sort that not only Japanese but Western poets try to realize. When we compare the two poems above, this point becomes clear. But in the revised verse the seashore becomes a part of the great universe aesthetically wrapped in the twilight of dawn. And the lancelet, no more than an inch white, breathes in significant form, its transparent beauty alive against the atmosphere at early dawn. Otsuji has pointed out why it is essential for the poet constantly to apply effort and discipline in the realization of his intuition: Only thus, too, can his critical judgment be sharpened and enable him to recognize falseness in his work.

The deceased master [Basho— ] often spoke thus. For example, Stephen Pepper: It gives us direct insight into the nature of the world. It shows us what is real there, it realizes events. Art is thus as fully as cognitive, fully as knowing as science, so that the contextualists are fond of calling intuition of quality a real- ization. If we have shown that the aesthetic form is altogether indepen- dent of the intellectual and suffices to itself without external support, we have not said that the intellectual can stand without the aesthetic.

This reciprocity would not be true. Concepts are not possible without intuitions.

1. Quiet, Please!.
2. Upcoming Events.
3. Passion in the Office!

Reality, as painted by science for its own needs, has been mistaken for ultimate reality, which, being based on a positivistic, mechanistic naturalism, wrought havoc with traditional religious, philosophic, and aesthetic assump- tions. It is, in fact, impossible. As Cleanth Brooks has put it: Moreover, the Japanese as yet unburdened by invidious comparisons between science and art, are not so defensive as the Western thinkers and speak more freely. Representative statements along this line follow.

Let us first take Otsuji: Once an abbot asked Onitsura what the essence of haiku art was, and he replied: Onitsura thinks that the true way of haiku art is to discover poetic refinement in the truth of natural phenomena, whether in the snow, the moon, or flow- ers, with a selfless attitude. What he tried to find was not the out- ward appearance of nature, but to touch its very heart.

There is the seen; there is the heard. Where there is hokku as the poet has felt it, there is poetic truth. Briefly described, it refers to the inclusion in a haiku of the sense of the season of the year with which the haiku deals. Otsuji, in one of his characteristically pene- trating insights, declared that once the concept was accepted as absolutely essential to haiku, a most important conse- quence followed: Viewed against the popular idea that the seasonal theme is a man-made concept, the contention that it is unnecessary to haiku has some justification; however, if one comes to my idea that the seasonal theme is the natural object itself in all its natu- ralness—that its function is to symbolize nature—then for the first time will he come face to face with the problem of the rela- tionship between nature and himself.

Here the poet should think deeply of the problem of the self. The scientist also shares this awareness, but he, in scientific contemplation, has no other end than scientific knowledge of it. The artist, on the other hand, is not occupied, as is the scientist, in drawing conclu- sions from the object observed. Nor is he interested in making any judgments about it. He is interested in the object only for its own sake. Aesthetic contemplation is also characterized by single-mindedness, for in the state of aesthetic contemplation the subject and object are one.

Only as the poet remains com- pletely devoted to the totality of experience in contemplation does the concept of artistic sincerity have meaning. Morality for the artist also lies in his sincerity as he searches for poetic truth; the concept applies to the art work only in reference to the sincerity of the poetic intent and not to values outside the area of art. Poetic truth also arises from aesthetic sincerity, for it is a function of a realized insight, and is not to be deter- mined only by reference to fact or actuality. During the state of realization the quality of the object is grasped.

The anec- dote is told of Seiho— , the famous Japanese painter, that in look- ing at a picture of a chicken drawn by a student he clucked several times. Here awareness of the object was his whole being and he became that chicken. But had he exclaimed on the beauty of the painting, he would have been separated from the object he was observing; he would have been passing judg- ment upon it and would no longer have been one with it; and the experience would no longer have been aesthetic.

The con- tent of aesthetic experience is judged to be a kind of knowl- edge, different from the scientific, offering intuitive insight into the deepest levels of meaning. When an aesthetic contemplation is completed and the quality of the object is fully realized, the artist having felt the perception as a totality, this I call an aes- thetic moment.

It is characteristic of it that the completion of the reading of, let us say, a full-length novel or of the hearing of a long symphony does not end its effects. However, the relationship between the words and the resonation is that while a temporal element is inherent in the reading of the words, the insight into what is expressed through them, as they attain their full meaning simultaneously, is immediate. In this simultaneity and immediacy, obviously impossible with a novel, a sonnet, or even a quatrain, the words, although of course they give rise to these effects, do not function directly.

It is physically impossible for them to do so, where possibly a hundred thousand or so words, as in a novel, are concerned. Yet there is a literary form in which the words themselves can occur as a simultaneous happening. When this kind of aes- thetic moment does take place, I call it a haiku moment. A haiku moment is a kind of aesthetic moment—a moment in which the words which created the experience and the experience itself can become one. The total implication of the words in the realization of experience creates that sense of immediacy which Ezra Pound declared was essential for art: It is as difficult to create a haiku aris- ing from it as to create a tanka or a sonnet.

But if a poet over- comes its difficulties, we are charmed by its perfections. Rare indeed is the well-realized haiku, as Basho— repeated to his disciples in many ways: He who creates three to five haiku poems during a lifetime is a haiku poet. He who attains to ten is a master. It is aesthetic truth, wherein beauty lies and sincerity, when the poet is devoted to realizing it alone.

It is all that a poet can accept. Nor are such moments and experiences confined to artists alone. For when the ordinary man confronts a work of art, or indeed experiences aesthetically any object, his process of realization is identical to that of the artist. Insofar as he expe- riences it, he realizes its quality, what kind of thing it is. As Croce has said, there is no difference between the artist and his audience in the kind of experience each has: But how could this be possi- ble unless there be identity of nature between their imagina- tion and ours and unless the difference be one only of quantity?

It were well to change poeta nascitur into homo nascitur poeta; some men are born great poets, some small. The artist, however, must be able, as the layman need not, to embody and objectify his realization in terms of his particular discipline and of his individual insight. This leads to a consid- eration of various aspects of form and technique. I wish to limit this area to haiku and to show how the pre- ceding general remarks on aesthetic experience are illustrated in this form which is the gem of Japanese poetry.

To return to the poet in the rye field, we might assume that he saw a red dragonfly, but what he saw of it we do not know, for there is no poetry yet. Is it enough to say he saw the dragonfly in order for us to know what he saw? It is a paraphrase, perhaps, but it gives no experience. Poets being what they are, he, if he were told he had seen a red dragonfly in just those words, would probably not agree at all.

At this particular stage of the aesthetic process, he himself would not be able to say what he saw. Unless he does so, he may know he had an experi- ence, but he will not know what it was. It will remain vague, nebulous, teasing, and perhaps irritating to him for life, for actuality. Otsuji is quite explicit on this point: Once it is realized, by that very fact alone, it is formed; as Cassirer has said: For it is only in their identity, as Croce points out, that art is possible: Call them substance and form, if you please, but these are not recipro- cally exclusive.

They are one thing from different points of view, and in that sense identical. Along with such demands attempts are generally made to destroy tradi- tional forms and charges of dilettantism or sheer virtuosity are leveled at poets who continue to remain interested in their poetic function. But poetry is at once more modest and, in the great poets, more profound.

It is the art of apprehending and concentrating our experience in the mysterious limitations of form. I take it that this idea is as permanently true as any that we are apt to arrive at. Without its being formed, there is nothing. Also see pages 36—39 following. The pri- mary reason for a failure in form is succinctly stated by Otsuji: If one does not grasp something—something which does not merely touch us through our senses but contacts the life within and has the dynamic form of nature—no matter how cunningly we form our words, they will give only a hollow sound.

Those who compose haiku without grasping anything are merely exer- cising their ingenuity. The ingenious become only selectors of words and cannot create new experiences from themselves. These types change as is natural. If, as has been maintained, there can be no separation of form from content, another question arises as to the meaning of words that name forms, such as sonnet or tanka or haiku. The answer lies in the fact that a distinction between the two elements can be made, for the sake of convenience, so long as it is clearly understood that neither could exist without the other.

To return to our rye-field poet as he struggles to form his perception and to realize it, follow- ing only the necessity of realizing it and knowing what it is, how is he so fortunately able to form at the same time a sonnet or a haiku? For assuredly aesthetic experiences do not come in ready-made packages to be labelled haiku or tanka. Every experience, in becoming actual, creates its own form. No form can be pre-determined for it. If we examine individual, successful haiku, we will see, indeed, that no two are alike. Variations in rhythm, in pauses, tonal quality, rhyme, and so on are marked throughout; later pages will deal with these areas as they render an experience most concretely.

But the more important point to be noted in answer to the question raised lies in the general type of expe- rience which haiku renders. In a brief moment he sees a pattern, a significance he had not seen before in, let us say, a rye field and a crimson dragonfly. At the instant when our mental activity almost merges into an unconscious state—i.

It is dramatic, for is not the soul of drama presentation rather than discussion? The image must be full, packed with meaning, and made all significant, as the experi- ence is in aesthetic contemplation. This, then, is the kind of experience that occurs frequently and that the poet wishes to render, in all its immediacy. Haiku then is a vehicle for rendering a clearly realized image just as the image appears at the moment of aesthetic realization, with its insight and meaning, with its power to seize and obliterate our consciousness of ourselves. Or rather, when a poet wishes to render such an experience, the haiku form seems supremely fitted for it, not because he writes or wishes to write a haiku, but because of the nature of the expe- rience.

This act of vision or intuition is, physically, a state of concentration or tension in the mind. The length, that is, is necessitated by haiku nature and by the physical impossibility of pronouncing an unlimited number of syllables in a given breath. As I have stated before, what is uniquely characteristic of this moment in regard to the form in which it is conveyed, is the identity between it and the words which realize it.

One aspect of the haiku form which contributes to this identity is the length of seventeen syllables, which, as will be discussed later, is the average number of syllables that can be uttered in one breath. Kenkichi Yamamoto has acutely described the situation: As Iong as a haiku is made up of the interlocking of words to a total length of seventeen syllables in its structure, it is inevitable that it be subject to the laws of time progression; however, I think the fact that it is a characteristic of haiku to echo back as a totality when one reaches its end—i.

That is to say, on one hand the words are arranged by the poet within the seventeen syllables in a temporal order; on the other hand, through the grasping insight of the reader, they must attain meaning simultaneously.

Haibun Today: A Haibun & Tanka Prose Journal

It must have been some such thought as this that Basho— had in mind when he told his disciple Kyorai: Not a single word should be care- lessly used. We will talk about the plot, the characters, the ideas, the fine effects, and so on. But we can hardly give the words in which the experience was conveyed. The same holds true even of shorter forms such as the sonnet or quatrain, as has been maintained; for with most readers, no matter how meaningful the experience of them has been, a certain conscious effort at memorization is necessary to remember their exact words.

This is not true of the haiku. If we consult our experience with them, I think it will be agreed that memorable haiku can be remembered after the first read- ing. Nor is this due to their brevity alone, as will be clear if we recall how easily forgotten are telephone numbers, short mes- sages, or pithy epigrams based on intellection rather than aes- thetic realization. This is why I question Mr. For he goes on to say: Haiku is the poetic form based on a contra- diction. But when he suggests that there is a contradiction between these two aspects of the total haiku experience, he seems to separate what can only exist as one.

Even in those lit- erary forms other than haiku where, as I have suggested, the words used contribute to the total experience, they cannot be separated from it, for the experience can arise only from the words. I am maintaining that there is a difference between a contribution and a contradiction. If my definition of a haiku moment as one arising from a form in which the words and the experience are one is granted, it will follow that a contradiction between them is impossible.

It is from such an identity that there arises the freshness of experience which Basho— delighted in: In the Sanzo—shi it is stated: Freshness is the flower of haiku art What is old, without flower, seems like the air in an aged grove of trees. What the deceased master [Basho— ] wished for sincerely is this sense of freshness. He took delight in whoever could even begin to see this freshness. We are always looking for fresh- ness which springs from the very ground with each step we take forward into nature.

In this way, a haiku re-creates the true image of beauty in the mind of the reader, as it was experienced by the poet. Under yonder beech-tree single on the greensward, Couched with her arms behind her golden hair. Let us next try the following: More precious was the light in your eyes than the roses in the world. Thus we find that the longest lines in English to be read at one breath contain between sixteen and eighteen syllables.

This is true, not only in English, but also in the other languages. For instance, the songs written in the antique tongue employed by Homer in the Iliad and Odyssey and by Virgil in the Aeneid are in dactylic hexameter. And in Evangeline, where the classic meter is imitated by Longfellow, the meter consists of five dactyls and a final trochee, varying the number of syllables from sixteen to eighteen. Therefore we can say that the number of syllables that can be uttered in a breath makes the natural length of haiku.

This is why it is written in seventeen syllables, matching the length of the experience. Historically, the development of haiku can be traced from renga to haikai to hokku to haiku. However, the norm continued to be seventeen syllables. The problem has greatly occupied the attention of Japanese poets and critics, and Shiki, the able critic and poet who revived the vitality of haiku during the latter part of the nineteenth century, gave a wise and tolerant answer: Definition of the above terms will also be given there.

However, even though is its most common rhythm, haiku are not necessarily limited to this rhythm. For example, if we look into the older haiku, we will find examples of sixteen, eighteen, and up to twenty-five syllables; even in a haiku of seventeen syllables there can be other rhythms beside We want to give the name of haiku to all kinds of rhythm.

Moreover, verses widening the scope from fourteen to fifteen to even thirty syllables, may be called haiku. To differentiate these from haiku of the rhythm, we may call them haiku of fif- teen or twenty or twenty-five syllables or the like. The reasoning advanced by the new haiku school, dif- fering from that upon which Amy Lowell based her experi- ments, is an interesting repetition in some respects of the arguments that flourished in France during the latter nine- teenth century and in America during the s to justify so- called new approaches to literature. For example, Hekigodo intimates that changed social conditions make innovations in poetry imperative: The periods of Genroku [—] and Tenmei [—88] were built upon despotism, in which politics, economics, man- ners, customs, and education were based upon a class system.

Haiku was born and perfected during this time. The present Meiji period [—] has developed from a liberal ideal, in which politics, economics, manners, customs, and education are based upon a system of equality. Genroku and Tenmei were impressed almost equally by the restrictions arising from despotism and the class system. However, even the Tenmei period exhibited the characteristics of its time differently from the Genroku period.

Today, when the class system has been abolished and despotism has been replaced by the liberal ideal, it is unnatural for haiku to retain yet its old form. Here the new direction for haiku is born. For this reason, it is called the greatest change—a revolution—since the beginning of haiku history. But it seems most questionable whether that relationship is based pri- marily upon these characteristics of any period named by Hekigodo—the class system or the system of equality and the liberal ideal—and whether it is as mechanical as he implies.

What Hekigodo seems to be urging in his new program is that the poet should feel the necessity for change; but the poet, no matter how worthy the cause Hekigodo pleads, can deal poetically only with what he does feel and experience. Without becoming dogmatic, or exchanging imagination for instruction, it will be able to trouble the blameworthy, and revive the quivering courage of the humiliated. As Hulme put it: The object must cause the emotion before the poem can be written.

Although it does not need comment especially now, the current of world thought after the great [Russo-Japanese] war of —05 has brought confusion especially to our world of ideas. Even those who confined their interests to haiku only have not escaped this influence.

Touched by the new influence, we can laugh at the ignorance which wishes to maintain its own position. We will not push back the current of thought by closing the gates of the castle of haiku. To tell the truth, those minds which were culti- vated in the old thought have felt a shock. Moreover, those who have been educated in the scientific way and are interested in haiku naturally cannot help but be moved.

With the situation as it is, is it not wrong of those who think that they do not yet see a change in the interests of haiku?

For the development of the interests of haiku, have not the circumstances around us pro- gressed favourably in every respect? Most critics today, for example, would readily agree that successful haiku can be written on modern themes. But when he chose to name the scientific attitude or education as a representative aspect of the new ideas that will change haiku—specifically, destroy the length of seventeen syllables—one feels that in his enthusiasm he had lost sight of the difference between the nature of sci- ence and poetry, which has been explored in previous pages.

Our experience of a machine—even if our world were mechanical— is very different from our capacity to run it. The unique characteristic of haiku lies in its feudalistic form— that is, the fixed form of —and in the seasonal theme. Such a feudalistic form breaks down as the development of society takes place, and soon it dissolves into general poetry.

• Buy for others?
• Queer Travels: The Cambodian Diaries (Prospective Guides Book 5)?
• Les Gens dici (Documents) (French Edition).
• About 15/15 - family haikai by Andrea Cecon - Freado.

Free haiku is merely its transitional form. This fact means that such a small form cannot fully express a content which is proletarian and rev- olutionary. To establish a short form within the realm of poetry means to surrender it to bourgeois haiku. Therefore the proletarian haiku should dissolve into poetry. Let the [social] plans be well-wrought indeed, but let the arts teach us—if we demand a moral—that the plans are not and can never be absolutes. Poetry perhaps more than any other art tests with experience the illusions that our human predicament tempts us in our weakness to believe.

As has been stated, Shiki retreated from his original stand, in face of what he felt was the destruction of the poetic form: He berates writers for not having been active in the Revolution of When has Victor Hugo ever defended the rights of workers? It is already prosaic, yet is still bound by twenty-three to twenty-four syllables and cannot free itself entirely from verse. It is neither of prose nor verse—and does it create anything? Judging this kind of writing, so far as I can tell, what is called the new rhythm is merely a temporary phenome- non, which cannot flourish for any length of time.

It merely exists as an anomalous form of haiku.

Follow the Authors

Whether this is an advance, a retrogression, or a destruction, at any rate at present it cannot last permanently. He can thus take in longer lines since he absorbs only one aspect of them. The obverse of the length- ened haiku, as Yuyama points out, is the very primitive, short verse which also fails to exploit all the resources of communi- cation, once again because the modern has lost his ability to enjoy poetry fully. I recognize that to express a thought in a certain fixed form is a technique, and the technique itself does its most effective work when it transfers the thought to another.

People generally accept haiku as a poetic form of seventeen syllables arranged in three lines of five, seven, and five syllables each. They express their thoughts and feelings as freely as they can in this form and appreciate it with each other. That, I believe, is one of the great reasons why haiku exist in the world of poetry. It orig- inated from the main stream of basic poetic elements in our language mainly word groups, centering around seventeen or eighteen syllables.

In short, these poetic elements which appear in the lyrics of ancient time surge forth on the tide of the flourishing period of haikai. There are certain basic attributes of an object which serve to identify it and locate it amid the constant barrage of impressions which impinge on consciousness. Objects, that is to say, are located in time and space. Basho— , let us say, was passing through a field one autumn evening and a crow on a branch caught his attention. Similar scenes had doubtlessly been seen by many people before him, but he is the one who made it a memorable event by forming his experience of it in the following haiku: Without them the experi- ence cannot be fully realized, nor can a haiku moment be created completely.

Let us then consider these three elements more fully. When As has been often remarked, many a successful haiku, if not all, has in it a sense of a vivid yet subtly elusive air, filling every corner of the haiku, imponderable, yet making its presence felt. This is a live atmosphere that comes from a sense of the season with which the haiku deals, adding clarity and fullness to the other elements in the haiku, as well as bringing to bear upon the haiku moment the many riches already belonging to it as a part of our funded experience.

Such a seasonal feeling arises from either the theme of the poem or from the inclusion in it of a so-called seasonal word. For example, in the following poem by Ryo— ta haze is the word which informs us that the season is spring: Here is beautifully suggested the liquid light of a very early spring morning, with a tender haze from which rise the voices of unseen people. Note how accurate the seasonal touch is, which demands the word haze and not mist, which is colder, wetter, and thicker in feeling. Mist is actually used as an autumn theme. The clear new air which only spring can create rises into the spaciousness of the long hallways from every word in this haiku.

When a seasonal word is thus fully realized, it is an aesthetic symbol of the sense of seasons, aris- ing from the oneness nf man and nature, and its function is to symbolize this union. The necessity of having a seasonal symbol in a haiku has been a matter of some dispute as is evidenced for example in the following statement by Ippekiro—: There are those who say my verses are haiku. There are those who say they are not haiku. As for myself, what they are called does not matter. My feeling is that my verse differs in its point of view from what have been called haiku up to now.

First, I am indifferent to an interest in the seasonal theme, which is one of the important elements in haiku. It is not a manner of concern to me whether there is a seasonal word or not. I believe I have freed myself completely from the captivity of the seasonal theme. I do not write verse with the intention of putting seasonal words in them, or of leaving them out. I write freely as my thought arises. Asano observes that there was little realization around the concept: The word which pointed out the season in which the poet composed the haiku was enough, and although seasonal words were used, we can assume that the content of such words was not fully realized.

Indeed, so conventionalized and artificial had the seasonal words become that saijiki, or collections of seasonal themes which were usually used in haiku, were com- piled, classifying them as belonging to certain, predetermined seasons. For example, cherry blossoms denoted spring; drag- onflies, summer etc.

BUY ONLINE

Such words were then called seasonal words. Poets forgot that such terms were only arbitrary, and that the concept could be given life only as the word was real- ized, as Otsuji states: Since the seasonal theme refers to natural objects as they are, it is not a man-made concept, but exists. Seasonal themes have been classified according to the four seasons for the sake of convenience in editing anthologies of haiku, but aside from that, they have no mean- ing.

In actuality, a sense of season cannot be formed with- out haiku, and for us who consider that it arises from the total poetic effect of the haiku itself, it is a symbol of feeling. The peony has its own quality and characteristics; that quality or characteristic is the seasonal theme. The things of nature are born and fade away in the rhythm of the seasons. Realization of their quality must take into account the season of which they are inseparably a part.

Obviously, without a seasonal theme—i. The objec- tive correlative is not adequate to convey the experience; and its omission shows that the poet did not become one with nature. Haiku written from such a basis run the danger of being about an experience, rather than becoming an experience. Otsuji, in recognizing this pitfall, suggests what the function of the seasonal theme is in haiku and what its meaning is: A haiku in which each concept is lined up in a row sometimes becomes merely an accumulation of concepts and, losing realistic poetic feeling, becomes dull.

This is a shortcoming inevitable to haiku which are composed by an analytical mind. Something which is more than capable of meeting this danger is the seasonal theme. Since the seasonal theme is a feeling that arises in seeing disinterestedly and praising the dignity of unadorned nature, the interest in haiku poetry lies here where everything is harmonized and unified with this feeling. Therefore, the development of interest in haiku can be said, in short, to be the development of the seasonal theme in haiku poetry.

The interest in the seasonal theme, in other words, is an enlightened, Nirvana-like feeling. The atmosphere in which a haiku is written will be born from this interest in the seasonal theme. Therefore, to write haiku without it is either an unsuccessful attempt at copying amusingly without any real poetic impulse or results in a kind of unpoetic epigram whose main objective is witty irony. Thus, even human affairs, when treated of in haiku, are not purely human affairs, as Otsuji observes: When even a part of human affairs is considered as a phenome- non of nature, there is a grand philosophical outlook, as if we had touched the very pulse of the universe.

Herein we find the life of haiku. Human affairs as they appear in haiku are not presented as merely human affairs alone. Both human affairs and natural objects are inseparably woven into a haiku. Both the appreciation and the creation of haiku should be based on such a concept. In it, that relation- ship is changed from a concept to an experience—as it must be in order for it to have the alive meaning that art can give it.

It is against such a background of thinking that Otsuji makes the following key observation, which though previously quoted will be given again because of its importance: That even in the most imaginative flights there is always a holding back, a reservation. The classical poet never forgets this finite- ness, this limit of man.

He remembers always that he is mixed up with earth. He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas. Indeed, as has been previously pointed out, the influential writer W. Urban indicates that poetry may deal with many subjects, but always deals with one: It is not without meaning for us, therefore, to find such statements as the following one by Otsuji: The air of this haiku is greatly dependent on the seasonal element. Were it to be changed, let us say, to a summer evening, the whole effect would be lost, for the seasonal air is as important to a haiku as light is to an impressionistic painting.

From the very aloneness and darkness of the crow, from the very bareness of the bough arises the autumn, becoming an actuality in the haiku and creating the air of the haiku with which a poet fills the space. The felt-object, being thus steeped in and blended with it, becomes superlatively significant. That the autumn arises from that same dignity of unadorned nature which Otsuji named59 as one of the sources of the seasonal feeling, is quite clear in the simple, tranquil naming of the bough and the crow and the evening.

Here too is the enlightened, Nirvana- like feeling Otsuji called for in the complete identity of the poet with the scene he has intuited. One sign of how success- ful the realization has been is the rising up of the sense of autumn from the whole haiku, unifying and filling the haiku world. But the abstraction becomes concrete because of the absolute totality and reality of the intuition which is the haiku. In the following poem the season is only implied or suggested: The nightingales sing In the echo of the bell Tolled at evening.

For the Japanese the sense of season is so impli- cated in natural objects that the nightingales themselves are spring. They do not merely suggest or imply spring. They contain it; they incorporate it. It is in this sense that imply, sug- gest, and associate are to be taken, not as indicating something separate from the nightingales, as a first reading might lead one to believe. So in such haiku as the foregoing, the object and the time often coincide. Here, by implication, the evening is a spring evening.

And from our own associations, which are a part of our funded experience, there rises up the delicate sweetness of such a balmy evening, filling the haiku, caressing and becoming one with the sounds in it. Let us take another example: A crimson dragonfly, As it lights, sways together With a leaf of rye. In the three haiku quoted above, it will be noted that while the season is indicated in each one, the time element is not necessarily confined to it alone. From the season, the time ele- ment can be narrowed down to the day or night, and even more narrowly to a particular moment during the day or night.

The three elements, it is clear, must reinforce each other and become one unity if we are to avoid a mere enumeration. Consider the following poems: Warm the weather grows Gradually as one plum flower After another blows. Here at parting now, Let me speak by breaking A lilac from the bough. In none of these poems is the place specifically designated, although we are easily led to visualize the scene. In the second, again the place, while omitted, is easily supplied by the reader: In the third, the lilacs themselves provide their own place.

The reason why the indication of the place may be omitted seems to lie in the readers ability to supply it, as it is suggested in the object, and also in the relative stability of place as com- pared to time. The plum tree in a garden will always be in a garden, but its appearance will change radically during the various seasons of the year, or the various times of the day.

However, in the majority of haiku the place is usually named, lending concreteness to the image.

Welcome to our online family blog!

Some one from below Is looking at the whirling Of the cherry snow. What The common pattern of experience, as noted before, is always an interaction between a live creature and some aspect of his environment, as Dewey puts it. But what is common to all poets is the object, in the largest sense, in his environment, which can become significant.

If such a special object. As Otsuji has said, the feeling is objectified: Aso— has put it clearly: Otherwise a separation arises between the poet and the object. Then a real insight into the pine arises. Thus will it become a pine into which the human heart has entered. It will become sentient, instead of remaining a natural object, viewed through the five senses objectively. And furthermore contemplating the human feeling infused into the object, the poet expresses it through the illumination of his insight, and when that feeling finds its expression, it becomes the art of haiku.

As Croce has said: Emotion, then, is a quality of experience, as Dewey has said: Haiku eschews metaphor, simile, or personification. Nothing is like something else in most well-realized haiku. As Basho— has said: Almost he seems to aim at the paring down of his medium to the absolute minimum, so that the least words stand between the reader and the experience!

His aim is to render the object so that it appears in its own unique self, without reference to something other than itself,—which is where vision ends and intellection begins—and so that it can never be mistaken for any other object than itself. This it is which is the motive for his poetry. It seems to me that in the absolutely direct statement of haiku we get a rewarding example of this insight being consistently incorpo- rated in poetic practice.

The haiku poet will never leave any attachment between himself and the haiku he composes. Such extraneous information, valuable for other than aesthetic reasons to, for example, the literary histo- rian, must not be essential for the experiencing of the poem. For it has failed to communicate on the deepest level, toward which all art strives—the largest denominator of experience. The single-mindedness of the reader is distracted, and to that extent the experience is not aesthetic for him. James Joyce has amusingly described the relationship between the author and the living, self-sufficient being of his creation: The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied around each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible aesthetic life.

The personality of the artist. The mystery of aes- thetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. Such a procedure can lead only to triviality or to a miscellaneous collection of odds and ends, as Yamamoto points out: The true intention of Shiki was to appreciate and respect the objective world. Yet, even as great as he was, his appreciation was transferred to real facts [i. For this reason, many of the haiku he wrote were trivial. In the last analysis a haiku is a complete world.

If a fragment of a fact which is experienced casu- ally is only transferred to words, that fragment remains only a fragment. By this alone it cannot give the work a sense of completeness. He can only present his realization of the object, as that realization and experience have grown from the inter- action of the object and himself, his funded experience.

The deeper he has seen, the more profoundly his experience has been a vital growth between the object and himself, the more sharply realized his insight will be. The importance of the intensity and necessity of the growth lies in the ultimate value of all art, i. This is a haiku of the ear, full only of sounds. Both speak somehow of beauty. The bell, of the beauty man has made to worship his God; the birds, of the beauty God has made for his own joyous reasons.

How good it is that the two should be one in this moment! How this speaks, touching the deeper springs of being in a man effortlessly. Just as with the booming temple bell, the echoing expe- rience spreads farther and farther out, from this single haiku. This surely is the highest value of all art, and what ulti- mately each artist strives to communicate, to form.

And the haiku is the experience because the poet has rendered the objects as he experienced them. This I believe is the reason for the insistence upon the directness of rendering the object in haiku. As stated before, haiku tradition rules that the use of metaphor, simile, or personification impedes this aim.

Again for the sake of directness, relatively few adjectives and adverbs are used in haiku. Indeed, as Kyoshi Takahama has pointed out,77 there are a number of Japanese haiku with- out a single verb, adjective, or adverb. Truly, haiku could be called the poetry of the noun, which George Barker has said is the simple fact about it, after all the complexities have been explored: I learned that from William Shakespeare.

A poet must see how the three ele- ments exist, in one, as parts of a whole, without which they do not become an experience but only remain in a relationship to each other. Would that we could have a haiku like a sheet of ham- mered gold! This organic force, arising within and among the elements, determines the rhythm and flow which he feels, dispassionately, and tries to realize by word-rhythm and flow. Out of this effort, a verse comes in its original meaning of the term versum, a turning.

For a poet tries to create a haiku moment with words in temporal order. Those words will group themselves according to the rhythm and flow of the organic force which holds the three haiku elements in a whole. Much as music proceeds in phrases, the haiku proceeds in lines, by turning. The construction of these lines cannot be arbitrarily imposed by the poet; he cannot determine that he will end a line here and turn into the next line there.

Rather, the aesthetic realization itself, forming itself in groups of words, pausing, going on, will determine the place for a turning, out of its own being and through the inner necessity of expressing itself. I do not mean to suggest here that the realization is some sort of magical power and regulator. For of course, while it has life, it does so because the poet experienced it.

It is perhaps the simplest type of turning within a haiku and emphasizes the calm tranquility that is its tone. The impossibility of turning otherwise than Basho— does can be tested by actually terminating the flow of the rhythm differently. On a withered bough, a crow alone Is perching; Autumn evening now. The effect of the second line is to place too great in emphasis on what the crow is doing, whereas it is the stillness of the crow that is harmonious with the mood of the poem, not its activity.

Brushing the leaves, fell A white camellia blossom Into the dark well. Brushing the leaves, Fell a white camellia blossom Into the dark well. The poet, it might be argued, preferred the first version in order to obtain the traditional five syllables for the first line of the haiku, as well as to have a rhyme with the third line. At first reading, the rhythm of the line seems very abrupt and harsh to the lis- tening ear, as the two accented words come at the end of the line, but this apparent discord is appropriate to the action so characteristic of the camellia—the surprising abruptness with which it falls.