The Heart of Haiku

by Jane Hirshfield

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.

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.

To read a haiku is to become its co-author, to place yourself inside its words until they reveal one of the proteus-shapes of your own life.

When Bashō was twenty-two, Yoshitada, his boyhood friend, supporter, and possibly lover, died. This loss, ten years after the death of his father, resulted once again in a kind of chrysalis-expulsion. Some accounts say Bashō entered a monastery immediately after his friend’s death; others report that he fathered a child. Based on the poet’s own later comments, he seems to have passed through something akin to what the Amish refer to as “wilding,” a period of sampling everything the sensual world has to offer.

Haiku’s suggestiveness is penumbra, not umbrella.

To feel sabi is to feel keenly one’s own sharp and particular existence amid its own impermanence, and to value the singular moment as William Blake did “infinity in the palm of your hand”—to feel it precise and almost-weightless as a sand grain, yet also vast. In

wabi conveys the beauty of the most ordinary circumstances and objects.

“Do not follow the ancient masters, seek what they sought.” However strong his opinions and theories, Bashō’s primary allegiance was to the living moment and its accurate, full-hearted presentation. Of the formal requirements of haiku, he said, “If you have three or four, even five or seven extra syllables but the poem still sounds good, don’t worry about it. But if one syllable stops the tongue, look at it hard.”

The words he wrote on the rim his home-made traveling hat can be translated, loosely, as these: Under this world’s long rains, here passes poetry’s makeshift shelter.