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Daily Notes on Poetry
19 August 2004. Back to poetry, in particular to the following haiku by Basho, as translated by David Burleigh and Kimiyo Tanaka in the Autumn 2004 issue of Modern Haiku
autumn deepens--
I wonder what he does,
the man next door.
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I found this poem immediately striking, but couldn't figure out why, at first, and I wanted to, for I found it while looking through Modern Haiku for something to write about here. I now think it contains a juxtaphor, as just about all the best haiku do, in my opinion. A juxtaphor, in my poetics, consists of two images near or next to each other in a passage or area of a page that clearly comprise an implicit metaphor although there is no overt indicator in the poem that they are. Here, I claim, the mystery of Nature that is deepening (richly) toward death metaphorically equals the mystery of the man next door who is, as we all are, taking his own journey out of this life. A key to the poem's power is the contrast between the grand image of Autuman and the homely one of some next door neighbor.
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