Haiku: This Other World by Richard Wright

Haiku: This Other World by Richard Wright

Author:Richard Wright [Wright, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781611453492
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2011-08-08T16:00:00+00:00


AFTERWORD

I

Like transcendentalists such as Emerson and Whitman, Japanese haiku poets were inspired by nature, especially its beautiful scenes and seasonal changes.1 Although the exact origin of haiku is not clear, the close relationship haiku has with nature suggests the ways in which the ancient Japanese lived on their islands. Where they came from is unknown, but they must have adapted their living to ways of nature. Many were farmers, others hunters, fishermen, and warriors. While they often confronted nature, they always tried to live in harmony with it: Buddhism and Shintoism taught them that the soul existed in them as well as in nature, the animate and the inanimate alike, and that nature must be preserved as much as possible.

Interestingly, haiku traditionally avoided such subjects as earthquakes, floods, illnesses, and eroticism—ugly aspects of nature. Instead, haiku poets were attracted to such objects as flowers, trees, birds, sunset, the moon, genuine love. Those who earned their livelihood by labor had to battle with the negative aspects of nature, but noblemen, priests, writers, singers, and artists found beauty and pleasure in natural phenomena. They had the time to idealize or romanticize nature and impose a philosophy on it, and as a result they became an elite group in Japanese culture. Basho was an essayist, Buson a painter, and Issa a Buddhist priest—and each was an accomplished haiku poet.

The genesis of haiku can be seen in the waka (Japanese song), the oldest verse form, of thirty-one syllables in five lines (5,7,5,7,7). As an amusement at court someone would compose the first three lines of a waka and another person would be challenged to provide the last two lines to complete the verse. The haiku form, a verse of seventeen syllables arranged 5,7,5, with such exceptions as 5,7,6 and 5,8,5, etc., corresponds to the first three lines of the waka. Hyakunin Isshu (One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets, A.D. 1235), a waka anthology compiled by Fuji-wara no Sadaiye, contains haiku-like verses. Sadaiye’s “Chiru Hana wo” (“The Falling Blossoms”), for example, reads:

Chiru hana wo The falling blossoms:

Oikakete yuku Look at them, it is the storm

Arashi kana2 That is chasing them.



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