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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Japanese poetic “lines” are heard, rather than written with visually separate line breaks on the page,
One further detail is widely known in the West: the poem must evoke a particular season, by name or association.
The main point in the original Japanese is the poem’s mirroring construction: two identical words at the haiku’s center replicate both visually and in sound what is being described.
In Japanese poetry, allusion to the moon is always, first, the moon itself, actual in the night sky. But the image holds almost always some additional meaning—often a Buddhist reference to awakened understanding.
The cries of monkeys are hard for a person to bear— what of this child, given to autumn winds?
