7 February 2004. Back to the poem by Basho:

or:

Both versions work in a major way, in spite of only telling, because of the size of the scene they open up. It is (1) a night wide enough to contain lightning too far away to be heard; (2) a landscape rising from the earth where the poet presumably is, to the heron, to the lightning; (3) an overview of expressiveness ranging from the inanimate sky's to the highly animate heron's (both combined in a poet's expressiveness); (4) an auditory continuum containing at one end silence, but also thunder, and birdcries at the other; (5) an interrelationship of a weather and a lifeform, with connotations (for me) of creation--somewhere in darkness a huge storm . . . and the emergence of life signals, nothing else.

And, lo, in the vastness of the night the heron exactly equals the thunderstorm. Or, perhaps, surpasses it--because able to be heard? And, because we're in a haiku (or celebration of the oneness of the universe), the raging sky has no less a pulse and hormones than the heron, nor does the lone heron have less permanance and ultimate might than the sky.

After writing the above, I looked through Haiku Harvest for another haiku to write about in order to keep this entry from being my shortest so far, but found none close to as good as the preceding one. Many are simply well-expressed snippets of homey wisdom, and humanity. For example, Issa's:

Who cannot empathize with him? But what makes his haiku significantly superior to the same feeling expressed in prose? Just above this poem, however, is one by Teitoku that uses personification with a winning freshness:

I think of Robert Frost's whimsy. The key to its effect, of course, is the absurd but somehow appropriate mistaking of a difference in physical state (or whatever it's called in chemistry) for a difference of opinion. . . .

To finish this little survey of haiku, I'm now going to turn to the late Robert Spiess's contribution to the latest issue of Modern Haiku: "the season's first snow/ flake by flake widely spaced/ majestically slow." It's main feature is the use of dots (not periods, so I couldn't reproduce the poem accurately here, except as a graphic, which I don't have time to do), one between each adjoining word, acting both as snow and to retard the poem's flow. But even more than that freshness, I love the not uncommon but unexpected description of the snow as the majestic conquerer it is. And, ah, the serenity the poem conveys!