here, into three-line form.) One further detail is widely known in the West: the poem must evoke a particular season, by name or association. Haiku is a welcoming form, taught often in elementary school classes. In a testament to both the limitlessness of any subject and the suppleness of haiku mind, over 19,000 haiku about Spam—“Spamku”—have to this date been posted online. Yet to write or read with only this understanding is to go back to what haiku was before Bashō transformed it: “playful verse” is the word’s literal meaning. Bashō asked more: to make of this brief, buoyant verse-tool the kinds of emotional, psychological and spiritual discoveries that he experienced in the work of earlier poets. He wanted to renovate human vision by putting what he saw into a bare handful of mostly ordinary words, and he wanted to renovate language by what he asked it to see.
Aging announced by the sensitivity of failing teeth; a street entertainer’s monkey; natural world phenomena; subtle examinations of mind and feelings—each is conveyed in Bashō’s haiku by what seems a single motion of the ink brush:
growing old:
eating seaweed,
teeth hitting sand
otoroiya ha ni kui ateshi nori no suna
first winter downpour:
the street monkey, too,
seems to look for his small straw raincoat
hatsushigure saru mo ko mino o hoshi ge nari
seas darkening,
the wild duck’s calls
grow faintly white
umikure te kamo no koe honoka ni shiroshi
the crescent moon:
it also resembles
nothing
nanigoto no mitate ni mo ni zu mika no tsuki
even in Kyoto,
hearing a cuckoo,
I long for Kyoto
kyōnite mo kyō natsukashi ya hototogisu
Bashō’s haiku, taken as a whole, conduct an extended investigation into how much can be said and known by image. When the space between poet and object disappears, Bashō taught, the object itself can begin to be fully perceived. Through this transparent seeing, our own existence is made larger. “Plants, stones, utensils, each thing has its individual feelings, similar to those of men,” Bashō wrote. The statement foreshadows by three centuries T.S. Eliot’s theory of the objective correlative: that the description of particular objects will evoke in us corresponding emotions.
The imagist aesthetic introduced to Western poetry near the start of the 20th century by Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, and Eliot is so deeply part of current poetics that few recognize its historical origins in Asia. Haiku in its strict form has continued to draw many American contemporary writers as well, from the poet Richard Wilbur to the novelist Richard Wright, who wrote thousands of haiku during his final years. One magnet is the paradox of haiku’s scale and speed. In the moment of haiku perception, something outer is seen, heard, tasted, felt, emplaced in a scene or context. That new perception then seeds an inner response beyond paraphrase, name, or any other form of containment.
Here is one such poem, seated in objective perception:
dusk: bells quiet,
fragrance rings
night-struck from flowers
kanekiete hana no ka wa tsuku yūbe kana
This poem lives almost entirely in the ears and the nose, in perception both outward and accurate—the scent of certain blossoming trees does strengthen at nightfall, and orange trees (strongly night-scented) surround the temple at Ueno, where the haiku was written. The words show Bashō’s characteristic synaesthesia: bell-sound and twilight, flower-scent and time, are painted together into the mind, placed into a relationship that seems neither sequential nor causative. This haiku’s emotion cannot be defined except by repeating its own words; its center of gravity lies in the phenomenal world, outside the self. Yet it carries the scent and weight of strong feeling.
Haiku perception can travel the other direction as well. A thought, emotion, or circumstance already present in the mind can be
Aging announced by the sensitivity of failing teeth; a street entertainer’s monkey; natural world phenomena; subtle examinations of mind and feelings—each is conveyed in Bashō’s haiku by what seems a single motion of the ink brush:
growing old:
eating seaweed,
teeth hitting sand
otoroiya ha ni kui ateshi nori no suna
first winter downpour:
the street monkey, too,
seems to look for his small straw raincoat
hatsushigure saru mo ko mino o hoshi ge nari
seas darkening,
the wild duck’s calls
grow faintly white
umikure te kamo no koe honoka ni shiroshi
the crescent moon:
it also resembles
nothing
nanigoto no mitate ni mo ni zu mika no tsuki
even in Kyoto,
hearing a cuckoo,
I long for Kyoto
kyōnite mo kyō natsukashi ya hototogisu
Bashō’s haiku, taken as a whole, conduct an extended investigation into how much can be said and known by image. When the space between poet and object disappears, Bashō taught, the object itself can begin to be fully perceived. Through this transparent seeing, our own existence is made larger. “Plants, stones, utensils, each thing has its individual feelings, similar to those of men,” Bashō wrote. The statement foreshadows by three centuries T.S. Eliot’s theory of the objective correlative: that the description of particular objects will evoke in us corresponding emotions.
The imagist aesthetic introduced to Western poetry near the start of the 20th century by Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, and Eliot is so deeply part of current poetics that few recognize its historical origins in Asia. Haiku in its strict form has continued to draw many American contemporary writers as well, from the poet Richard Wilbur to the novelist Richard Wright, who wrote thousands of haiku during his final years. One magnet is the paradox of haiku’s scale and speed. In the moment of haiku perception, something outer is seen, heard, tasted, felt, emplaced in a scene or context. That new perception then seeds an inner response beyond paraphrase, name, or any other form of containment.
Here is one such poem, seated in objective perception:
dusk: bells quiet,
fragrance rings
night-struck from flowers
kanekiete hana no ka wa tsuku yūbe kana
This poem lives almost entirely in the ears and the nose, in perception both outward and accurate—the scent of certain blossoming trees does strengthen at nightfall, and orange trees (strongly night-scented) surround the temple at Ueno, where the haiku was written. The words show Bashō’s characteristic synaesthesia: bell-sound and twilight, flower-scent and time, are painted together into the mind, placed into a relationship that seems neither sequential nor causative. This haiku’s emotion cannot be defined except by repeating its own words; its center of gravity lies in the phenomenal world, outside the self. Yet it carries the scent and weight of strong feeling.
Haiku perception can travel the other direction as well. A thought, emotion, or circumstance already present in the mind can be
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