The Heart of Haiku

by Jane Hirshfield

In this mortal frame of mine, which is made of a hundred bones and nine orifices,

old pond: frog leaps in the sound of water

even in Kyoto, hearing a cuckoo, I long for Kyoto kyōnite mo kyō natsukashi ya hototogisu

Bashō instructed, “The problem with most poems is that they are either subjective or objective.” “Don’t you mean too subjective or too objective?” his student asked. Bashō answered, simply, “No.”

how admirable— a man seeing lightning and not satori*

looking exactly like blue flag iris: blue flag iris inside the water’s shadow

In Japanese, the alloy of beauty and sadness found in this poem is described as sabi—a quality at the heart of much of Bashō’s mature writing. The noun sabishi is generally translated as “loneliness,” or sometimes “solitude,” but the word originates in associations very close to those found in this haiku: it holds the feeling of whatever is chill, withered, and pared down to the leanness of essence. “The works of other schools of poetry are like colored paintings; my disciples paint with black ink,” Basho later said. 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 making the expression of sabi one of haiku’s goals, Bashō turned his own and his students’ writing toward a new spirit. The gravitational pull of that renewed seriousness shifted haiku-writing from the construction of entertainment to the making of art.

“Eat vegetable soup, not duck stew,” Bashō famously told his students,

was an evocation of wabi. An idea often linked to sabi, and equally important to Bashō’s work, wabi conveys the beauty of the most ordinary circumstances and objects. A hemp farmer’s jacket, a plain fired-clay cup, the steam rising from a boiling teapot— these are wabi’s essence. A gold-and-cloisonné bowl or ornate silk clothes are its opposite. In the spirit of wabi, then, this poem mulls the deep satisfaction of a life stripped almost bare.

These alterations show that even his most seemingly unstudied and artless works were often produced by a method quite unlike what is sometimes described as a “Zen” “first thought, best thought.”

One Zen saying proposes, “Live as if you were already dead.”

The haiku’s response reflects the spirit of Bashō’s early teachers, who suggested that haiku’s essence was to find, in the face of the long-familiar, something not yet said.

Year after year, the monkey’s face wears a monkey’s mask

It reminds of the story of a Zen master who, finding his hut has been robbed, goes running after the thief with a last pot in his hand: “Thief, stop! You forgot this!”

New Year’s Eve cleaning— the carpenter hangs a shelf in his own house.

His poetry, Bashō once told a student, was like a fan in winter, a stove in summer.

the cicada’s singing does not show its body is already dying