Fluences

Fluences is a section of troutswirl devoted to studying haiku, and haiku-like work, by 20th and 21st century western poets. Each installment will take a closer look at a poem, or a group of poems, by a poet who has either dabbled in haiku, been influenced by haiku, or whose work has had an influence, in some way or another, on 20th and 21st century English-language haiku.

Fluences is overseen by Nick Avis.

                                In a Station of the Metro

                                The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
                                Petals on a wet, black bough.

an exercise in fabricated metaphor

                The metaphors are
                gone, and so is my faith . . .
                sun over a moor

                     Nakamura Kusatao (24)

The fabrication of an image is achieved through appropriation and/or use of the imagination. There are three perspectives regarding fabricated or imagined images in haiku: they must be real or actually have happened; they can be fabricated but still must be capable of having happened or being real; reality is not necessary.

As for metaphor, the haiku community has been led to believe over the years that the use of metaphor in haiku, like all western poetic devices, is inappropriate if not forbidden.

Consider the following haiku by Basho (1644-1694) from his haibun, Oku-no-Hosomichi, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (1689 to 1691). (25) It is one of Basho’s best known and best poems:

summer grasses
where stalwart soldiers
once dreamed a dream

Makoto Ueda (26)

summer grasses—
traces of dreams
of ancient warriors

Haruo Shirane

natsukusu ya tsuwamonodomo ga yume no ato (27)

The adjectives “stalwart” and “ancient” are not found in the original and are added by the translators, yet both are implied in the prose preceding the haiku. “Stalwart,” meaning brave or resolute (Webster’s), though accurate, seems redundant. “Ancient” reflects the fact that Basho was thinking of the distant past, although it does not add very much to the poem.

According to Ueda and Shirane, “warrior” is the literal translation for tsuwamono to which the plural suffix domo is added. (28) The word yume (dream or dreams in the above translations) is singular and allows the translator to pluralize it although the singular would be the norm. (29)

There are two words in the original Japanese that have multiple meanings, a technique Basho often employed. According to Shirane, ato can mean site, aftermath, trace or track; and yume, can mean dream, ambition or glory. (30)

These multiple meanings can rarely be translated with one word in English and the resulting variations in the translations can be substantial. As a consequence, the variations in the interpretation of the poem can also be substantial.

Shirane translates ato as “traces;” Keene, as “aftermath” (31); Stryk, as “remains” (32); Earl Miner, as “vestiges” (33). Ueda, using the word “where,” interprets ato as place, the most benign of its meanings and the most literal. All of these translations, except Ueda’s, tend to be metaphorical.

The English words used in translation also have multiple meanings and each one brings something different to the poem. “Traces,” “vestiges” and “remains” are or can be synonymous.

In addition to its obvious meanings “traces” also means: “The path or way which anything takes.” (OED) This suggests fate or simply the way things are. It can be metaphorical in the sense that the soldiers’ dreams led them, inevitably, along a path of destruction.

“Aftermath” means: “the crop of grass which springs up after the mowing in early summer” (OED); “a result or consequence, esp. an unpleasant one.” (Webster’s) The first meaning is metaphorical and the second one implies that the soldiers’ dream was the cause of the tragic outcome.

“Remains” can also mean: “Those left, surviving, or remaining out of a number of persons” (OED); “to continue to exist, endure, persist; traces of the past; a dead body, corpse.” (Webster’s) These multiple meanings add depth to the interpretation of the poem, whether metaphorical or otherwise.

Translating yume as dream or dreams seems universal and by implication a soldier’s dream would include in most cultures glory and ambition. In Ueda’s translation the soldiers all have the same dream; in Shirane’s, each has his own dream. Mizuho (1876-1955), whom Ueda calls one of Basho’s “interpreters,” says “It is as though each soldier’s dream were lingering on each blade of grass.” (34)

The word “apparition” in Pound’s Metro Poem also has multiple meanings; and the multiplicity of meanings in both poems enriches them.

Two interesting observations regarding the season word are that the leaves of the summer grasses “are scorched at their tips under the flaming sun,” and “Basho’s summer grass is ‘warm’ with blood.” The summer grasses would be thick and deep. (35)

An “ancient battlefield is a sacred place . . . a kind of purgatory . . . where the souls of the slain soldiers, still retaining their anger and resentment, utter war cries day and night.” This is a fairly common theme in Noh drama. (36)

Basho’s haiku alludes to a famous battle at Takadachi castle and the tragic history leading up to its destruction (c. 1190.) Basho’s prose speaks of the fleeting nature of (military) glory; how it vanishes in the space of a dream; how it quickly became this grass or this grass is all that remains of it or this grass now covers it, depending on the translation. (37) He also alludes to these lines by Tu Fu: “Countries may fall, but their rivers and mountains remain. When spring comes to the ruined castle, the grass is green again.” (38)

In the prose preceding the poem Basho also alludes to a Noh play in which a man dreamed a lifetime of glory and defeat while taking a nap before supper. (39)

These literary and cultural allusions, which necessarily result in some appropriation, do not raise any concerns with Basho scholars, translators or interpreters. Such allusions are considered to add depth to a haiku and form part of what Haruo Shirane calls “cultural memory.”

Knowledge of such allusions is not always essential to interpret a haiku although it can be, but it is essential for a fuller understanding of it. Allusion is a key element or technique in many of Basho’s haiku and has been part of Japanese haiku ever since. In English haiku it is generally overlooked.

As for the soldiers’ dreams, Basho lived during a period of peace in Japan and he lived, by all accounts, a very peaceful life. (40) At best he can only imagine the battle, let alone the dreams of the soldiers who fought in it. Having never gone to war and never been in or seen one himself, he cannot even relate to the experience.

The image is rather abstract and can only reside in the imagination although most would have some appreciation of what is meant by soldiers’ dreams. No doubt in Basho’s time associating soldiers’ dreams with ambition and glory was firmly rooted in the cultural memory. Why else would the word yume mean all three? Today most cultures would make the same associations Basho did although there would likely be a great deal more ambivalence concerning the glory of war and soldiers’ dreams would have to include nightmares. Still, the soldiers’ dream of ambition and glory is more of an idea than a concrete image however well or universally understood.

Basho appropriated the image of grasses (surrounding ancient ruins) from a poem by Tu Fu, even though this is exactly what he saw, and he abstracted the idea of soldiers’ dreams from “cultural memory.” The interpretations of Tu Fu’s and Basho’s poems, on one level, are also very similar and metaphorical: the impermanence and futility of human endeavor, and the permanence and complete indifference of nature. Pound’s description of hokku as “one idea set on top of another” seems to apply quite well to this haiku by Basho.

Konishi (b. 1915), another of Basho’s interpreters, noted that: “For the first time in the history of haikai, an idea has become the subject of a poem.” (41) Ideation, generally thought of as forbidden in haiku, is at the root of fabricated images.

Shiki’s views regarding the use of imagination to create images in haiku seem to cover the full spectrum. He began by severely criticizing Basho for the poverty of his imagination and excessively praising Buson for the extraordinary range of his. He said “the fact that [Basho] discarded scenes which arise from imagination and are outside observation, as well as human affairs he had not experienced, shows that Basho’s realm was rather small.” Of Buson he said his imagination soars and “ranges beyond his country’s borders.” Later, he said that the imagination is “shallow” and that “many of the works which rely on [the imaginative method] are often bad.” (42)

Notwithstanding these contradictory statements, Shiki stressed realism and “direct, individual observation of the external world,” and his poems reflect this emphasis. (43) His observation that Buson used his imagination to create images much more so than Basho did is quite obvious from reading their poems, even in translation.

After Shiki, images from the imagination became more widespread and the more radical Modern Japanese haiku poets would often abandon reality altogether. Buson was, however, their predecessor, as these two examples clearly show:

About to bloom,
And exhale a rainbow,
The peony (44)

plum blossom’s scent—
has it risen so high?
a halo round the moon (45)

Bruce Ross says that Pound’s Metro Poem is “not really a haiku, which demands, for one thing, objectively real images.” (46) This reflects the traditional view, although the word “objectively” is redundant since the word “real” means something that has “an objective existence.” (OED)

Both images in Pound’s Metro Poem are not real based on Pound’s account in his Essay of what actually happened. He describes the faces as appearing one by one, but the poem has them all appearing at once in a singular apparition. This is consistent with the second image in which the petals are on the black bough, not landing on it. The second image is appropriated and likely imagined by Pound who took a year to come up with it. He never did say he actually saw the second image and it would not have concerned him in the least that he had fabricated and imagined either or both images.

Notwithstanding all the background information known about a poem, the (language of) the poem must speak for itself. Both images are capable of being real and there is no way of knowing from the language alone if they were made up. So both images are real in the poem itself. Appropriated images are usually easier to detect for obvious reasons.

In the following haiku by Buson, it is not possible to know that the poem is fabricated from the language alone:

this piercing cold—
in the bedroom, I have stepped
on my dead wife’s comb

Ueda

Yet Buson’s wife outlived him by more than thirty years. (47) No one seriously suggests it is not a haiku for this reason except perhaps Blyth, who also says it is not a haiku because “Haiku has nothing to do with bedrooms or dead wives or treading on this or that thing with its emotional associations.” (48)

For the two images in Pound’s Metro poem to occur simultaneously in the Paris Metro; for the poem to reflect something that could have happened and does happen in the language of the poem, the poet must either recall his earlier experience of the real image of “Petals on a wet, black bough,” or imagine this image when he sees the faces in the crowd. Basho’s haiku is similar in this respect.

In Basho’s haiku, the poet visits the site of a battle, obviously a well known one, and sees the ruins and the summer grasses. Upon seeing them, he recalls (from cultural memory) and imagines the battle itself and the dreams of the soldiers who fought in it.

In all the translations referred to in this article, except Shirane’s because of the word “ancient,” the language of the translations also allows for the poet to be visiting the site of a battle he actually fought in.

Ueda states unequivocally that in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Basho “changed the facts as he saw fit;” and that he did so “to present his theme more effectively.” He points out that Basho was not original in this and that “Ancient Japanese court diaries . . . were fictional to varying degrees” and “seemed to be based on the assumption that it was more important to record inner experience than outward events.” (49)

Shirane says that the season word in haiku can function as “a complex literary and cultural sign” that is “often highly fictional . . . .” (50)

Basho, like Pound, fabricated through appropriation and imagination the haiku itself or some part of it and probably some of the prose preceding the haiku as well. The vast majority of Basho’s haiku are, however, real or capable of being real.

The role of metaphor in haiku has been distorted by Henderson, Yasuda and Blyth, the three most influential translators and interpreters to introduce haiku to the English-speaking world. They simply ban metaphor and metaphorical interpretation in haiku as they do with all figures of speech. They also insist that haiku must have a season word.

At the other end of the spectrum are the views of Raymond Roseliep, one of the more radical poets of the North American haiku movement:

                  Metaphor I especially promote because it is the imagination’s pet tool.
                  To deny the poet either that tool or his creative mind in haiku is to re-
                  duce him to a mere poetaster. (51)

George Swede, one of haiku’s foremost critics and poets, in the late 1970s/ early 1980s took the view that metaphor was perfectly acceptable since “haiku are, after all, poetry,” noting that there are many examples in both classic and modern haiku of the restrained use of figures of speech, including metaphor. (52) The Modern Japanese poets were, however, not that restrained in their use of figures of speech.

Rod Willmot, another of haiku’s foremost critics and poets, also argued in the late 1970s/early 1980s that a “haiku contains two fundamental parts, which interact with each other metaphorically.” (53)

Shirane says that haikai, which includes haiku, “like all poetry, is highly metaphorical.” He points out, as one example, that the season word can be seen as “an implicit metaphor or extension of the poet’s inner state,” which “tends to be highly subjective.” (54)

Ueda’s translation of Basho’s haiku does not read as a metaphor, whereas Shirane’s does. How a translator perceives the role of metaphor in haiku can greatly influence their translation. Ueda very rarely translates Basho’s haiku as a metaphor or interprets them metaphorically. Shirane, as just noted, sees haiku as highly metaphorical.

Translations of some of the prose in The Narrow Road to the Deep North also tend to be metaphorical. As Ueda notes, the title itself is “more metaphorical than literal;” and even though there was an actual journey involved, Basho’s spiritual quest functions on a metaphorical level. Ueda concedes that some of the poems can be interpreted both literally and metaphorically, although he does not specifically refer to this haiku by Basho. (55) It is apparent that around this time Basho was at least thinking metaphorically.

Pound’s Metro Poem is written as a metaphor as is Basho’s haiku in all but one of the translations referred to in this article, and both can be interpreted metaphorically. However, what most, if not all of the critics referred to agree on, explicitly or implicitly, is that the juxtaposition of the two parts or two images of a haiku goes beyond metaphor. Bill Higginson argues that Pound achieved this intentionally when he changed the colon to a semi-colon. (56)

a haiku Shiki would have been proud to write

                  Amid the summer grass
                  the wheels of a steam engine
                  come to a standstill

                                    Yamaguchi Seishi (57)

Shiki advocated the modernization of haiku including its subject matter, but he was unequivocal that modern civilization was not a fit subject for haiku. (58) He specifically prohibited trains and, by implication, train stations. (59)

Seishi obviously alludes here to Basho’s “summer grasses” haiku and he appears to be the first to have blatantly violated Shiki’s particular admonition against trains. This highlights the role of allusion in haiku to other works of art, particularly to other haiku. Seishi’s haiku stands on its own, updates Basho’s haiku in a thoroughly modern context, and serves as a kind of commentary on it and Shiki’s position on modern civilization.

Higginson says that Pound’s Metro Poem, with the colon, is simply “a sentimental metaphor” because “one thing restates another in a different way, or that the first simply introduces the second.” Whereas:

                  A semicolon shows that the two statements are independent of each other,
                  though they may be related. So that “both ‘faces’ and “petals’ should be un-
                  derstood as real, physical objects, each a core image that stands out against
                  its own background. (60)

Higginson permits the second image to have been imagined. He does not insist that it be real only that it be understood as real. He also said earlier at a Haiku Society of America meeting in 1973 that the semicolon makes the images independent and equal or “coequal,” which results in “a third thing” from their juxtaposition; and that Pound’s revision of the poem allows but does not force the reader to interpret the poem as a haiku. (61) Later, in The Haiku Handbook (1985), he says it turns “an otherwise sentimental metaphor into a genuine haiku.” (62)

Ross, on the other hand, sees Pound’s Metro Poem with the semicolon as a metaphor; Stryk, as a simile.

Regardless, Higginson, like most, if not all of, the critics referred to in the previous section, requires the juxtaposition of images in a haiku to result in something more than a metaphor, and he does not interpret the poem metaphorically.

In dictionary and encyclopedia definitions of metaphor it is usually distinguished from a simile in two principal ways: it is implied rather than explicitly stated and it creates a sense of identity rather than a mere comparison between two images. The metaphor, like the simile, however, is one image expressed in terms of another; the images are related through their similarities and not their differences; and it juxtaposes a concrete image with an abstract thought, idea or interpretation. Metaphors are rarely intended to be taken literally. (63)

Pound never did describe the interaction of the two images in his Metro Poem as a metaphor, and does not even use that word in his Essay, or very often, when discussing Imagism or the Image.

Pound called the useful technique he relied on “a form of super-position.” The word “superpose” means: “Geom. To make (one figure) coincide with another in all parts, by or as if placing one on top of the other,” and if things coincide, an identity is created. (Webster’s) Pound does not appear to be describing a metaphor and if he was, why not simply say so?

In the first version of Pound’s Metro poem, the first two phrases of the first line, “The apparition      of these faces” is exactly the same length as the second line “Petals      on a wet, black bough;” one is set one on top of the other and they physically coincide.

In traditional haiku, the principal technique of juxtaposition is attributable to Basho, and his famous crow poem is considered the model (c.1679):

On a bare branch
A crow is perched—
Autumn evening.

kareeda ni karasu no tomarikeri aki no kure (64)

A number of Basho’s critics, including Shiki, Blyth, and Ueda (65), suggest he appropriated the image of a crow on a bare branch from classical Chinese art and poetry, to which he simply added the autumn evening, and maybe not even that. Yamamoto (1907 – 1988), a Basho scholar and interpreter, delicately implies that Basho may have appropriated the image from a renga verse printed in 1563—over a century before Basho’s crow poem (66):

evening crow—
in a bare tree on the mountain peak
a voice

Again, the critics do not seem too alarmed, although Shiki feels the haiku is trite, and Yamamoto is concerned with the similarities of Basho’s haiku with the one he quotes. In the poetry competitions that Basho judged, in keeping with the rules at the time, he would have had to disqualify his crow poem because it was too close in theme to the other haiku, which came earlier. (67) Implied in this is that a haiku poet needed to be familiar with what has been and is being written.

In Basho’s crow poem there is some debate as to whether the branch is bare, withered or dead because the translation of the word kareeda in the original permits all three. (68) This is another example of Basho using words with multiple meanings.

The poem is a model for two reasons: the new technique, which Henderson calls internal comparison; and the simple, objective, ordinary images it contains. (69) It is, however, a model for technique only.

In addition to the haiku-like qualities already mentioned in the previous section, there are a number of interesting parallels that can be made regarding Pound and Basho as founders of poetry movements and the two poems under consideration. (70)

Basho was weary of the artificiality of Japanese court poetry and looked to classical Chinese verse for inspiration. He set out to reform the poetry of his day and had for years consciously been working on a new technique. This poem is seen as the culmination of those efforts.

Basho had been experimenting with form, content, and language. His crow poem had two different versions with different syllabic structures: 5-10-5 then the present one with 5-9-5 Japanese syllables, both longer than the usual 17. The poem is expressed in the simplest possible language and the k sounds imitate the crow’s caw, which means that the crow is not silent.

The historical importance of the poem in the development of Basho’s haiku, and haiku ever since, cannot be overestimated, although some critics, Ueda for example, say its quality as a poem is exaggerated. Blyth sees at as a masterpiece and a milestone of Japanese culture. (71)

The principal of internal comparison is best described by Henderson himself:

                  . . . the two parts that make up the whole are compared to each other,
                  not in simile or metaphor, but as two phenomena, each of which exists
                  in its own right . . . in which the differences are just as important as the
                  likenesses. Here it is not simply that ‘over the withered landscape the
                  autumn nightfall settles like a crow.’ It is also the contrast of the small
                  black body of the crow with the vast amorphous darkness of the nightfall—
                  and whatever else the reader may find in it. (72)

It is easy to see here Henderson’s influence on Higginson’s thinking.

Comparison and contrast between the images in a haiku is implicit in the works of Blyth, Yasuda and others. Ueda does not cite Basho’s crow poem as an example of internal comparison but he does use that very phrase when discussing haiku later in Basho’s development and in particular his “old pond” haiku. (73) Willmot says that haiku’s “metaphorical structure” requires “comparison and/or contrast.” (74) Shirane speaks of “resonance in dissonance, congruity in incongruity.” (75)

Aristotle said over two thousand years ago that “to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.” Babette Deutsch, in her Poetry Handbook, has this response: “Twentieth century critics have shown that the making of good metaphors implies an eye for differences, too, and that the meaning of a metaphor issues from more complex interactions of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts than were dreamt of in that good Greek’s philosophy.” (76)

This suggests correctly that the metaphor has evolved over time and that the modern or contemporary metaphor is or can be much broader in scope than simply relating one image in terms of another through their similarities. Perhaps metaphorical interpretation and internal comparison have much more in common than previously recognized.

This concept of metaphor is very close to how Rod Wilmott saw metaphor functioning in haiku: a metaphorical structure involving comparison and/or contrast, in which the resulting relationships are interpreted metaphorically.

Fundamentally, however, metaphorical interpretation is still premised on ideas about things rather than the thing itself, something that many, if not most, consider essential to haiku. Generally, metaphors are also not intended to be taken literally whereas images in haiku are.

Higginson interprets the poem in the following way: “Our sense of the Paris commuters as delicate, vulnerable life builds, now that we see them come up out of the dark underground into a world of falling petals and spring mist.” (77)

Higginson’s interpretation does not preclude the possibility that the event can be interpreted metaphorically, nor does the semicolon. But the problem with his interpretation is that it alters the language of the poem. It requires the event to occur, not in the station, but on the way in, just outside. Higginson describes the poet/reader entering the Paris metro. This is not capable of having happened, nor can it actually have happened because of the word “In” in the title.

In the third and final part of this Fluence, some of Pound’s other haiku-like poems will be looked at, Pound’s Image will be compared with the haiku moment, and the discussion of whether or not Pound’s Metro Poem is or can be a haiku will be concluded.

24. Modern Japanese Haiku, Makoto Ueda, University of Toronto Press, 1976, p.198.
25. The Master Haiku Poet, MATSUO BASHO, Makoto Ueda, Kodansha International, 1970, pp. 30 and 169.
26. BASHO AND HIS INTERPRETERS, Makoto Ueda, Stanford University Press, 1991, pp. 242, 243.
27. Traces of Dreams, Haruo Shirane, Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 238.
28. Footnotes 26 and 27.
29. HAIKU MASTER BUSON, Yuki Sawa and Edith Shiffert, Heian International, 1978, p. 20.
30. Footnote 27, Shirane, p, 238.
31. Anthology of Japanese Literature, Donald Keene, Grove Press, 1955, p. 369.
32. ON LOVE AND BARLEY, Lucien Stryk, Penguin, 1985, p. 80.
33. Japanese Poetic Diaries, Earl Miner, University of California Press, 1969, pp. 176, 177.
34. Footnote 26, Ueda.
35. Footnote 26, Ueda.
36. Footnote 26, Ueda.
37. Footnote 27, Shirane; Footnote 31, Keene; Footnote 33, Miner; On the narrow road, Lesley Downer, Summit Books, 1989, p.70; Basho’s Narrow Road to a Far Province, Dorothy Britton, Kodansha International, 1980, pp. 56, 57.
38. Footnote 31, Keene.
39. Footnote 27, Shirane, p. 239
40. Footnote 25, Ueda, chapter 1.
41. Footnote 26, Ueda.
42. Masaoka Shiki, Janine Beichman, Twayne Publishers, 1982, pp. 58 to 60.
43. Footnote 24, Ueda, p. 7; Footnote 42, Beichman, p.31; Footnote 19, Henderson, p. 161; Footnote 27, Shirane, p. 38.
44. A ROSELIEP RETROSPECTIVE, David Dayton ed, Alembic Press, 1980, p. 20.
45. The Path of Flowering Thorn, The Life and Poetry of Yosa Buson, Makoto Ueda, Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 159.
46. Footnote 4, Ross.
47. Footnote 45, Ueda, p. 117.
48. A HISTORY OF HAIKU, Volume One, R. H. Blyth, Hokuseido Press, 1963, p. 255.
49. Footnote 25, Ueda, pp. 139 to 141
50. Footnote 27, Shirane, pp. 48, 49.
51. Footnote 44, Roseliep.
52. The Modern English Haiku, George Swede, Columbine Editions, 1981, pp. 28, 29.
53. A Haiku Path, The Haiku Society of America Inc., 1994, pp. 212, 213.
54. Footnote 27, Shirane, pp. 46 and 49.
55. Footnote 25, Ueda, pp. 136 to 138.
56. Footnote 3, Higginson; Footnote 53, pp. 93, 94.
57. Footnote 24, Ueda, p. 159.
58. Footnote, 42, Beichman, p. 31.
59. Modern Haiku, Poems by Seishi Yamaguchi, Takashi Kodaira and Alfred Marks, Mangajin, 1993, p. xvi.
60. Footnote 3, Higginson.
61. Footnote 53, pp. 93, 94.
62. Footnote 3.
63. The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, Ian Ousby, Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 658; Oxford Reference Encyclopedia, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 896; Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, third edition, Harper and Rowe, 1987, p. 643; A Glossary of Literary Terms, M. H. Abrams, Holt, third edition, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, pp. 60 to 63; Poetry Handbook, Babette Deutsch, fourth edition, Funk and Wagnalls, 1957, pp. 84 to 89; Webster’s; OED.
64. Footnote 25, Ueda, p. 44.
65. Footnote 64; Footnote 26, Ueda; HAIKU, Volume 3, Summer – Autumn, R. H. Blyth, Hokuseido Press and Heian International, 1982, p. 898.
66. Footnote 26, Ueda.
67. Footnote 25, Ueda, pp. 150, 151.
68. Footnote 65, Blyth.
69. Footnote 19, Henderson, pp. 18, 19.
70. Footnote 25, Ueda. The next thee paragraphs are taken from pp. 36 to 44.
71. Footnote 26, Ueda; Footnote 65, Blyth.
72. Footnote 19, Henderson, pp. 18, 19.
73. Footnote 25, Ueda, p. 53.
74. Footnote 53.
75. Footnote 27, Shirane, p. 108.
76. Footnote 63, Deutsch, p. 84.
77. Footnote 3, Higginson.

Fluences is a section of troutswirl devoted to studying haiku, and haiku-like work, by 20th and 21st century western poets. Each installment will take a closer look at a poem, or a group of poems, by a poet who has either dabbled in haiku, been influenced by haiku, or whose work has had an influence, in some way or another, on 20th and 21st century English-language haiku.

Fluences is overseen by Nick Avis.

Introduction

Ezra Loomis Pound (1885 – 1972) is considered to be the founder of Imagism and the foremost Imagist poet and theorist even though he only remained with the group for a little over a year. His poem In a Station of the Metro is certainly the best known Imagist poem and one of the best known poems of the 20th century. Pound is also considered a major figure in the Modernist movement. Imagistic ideas influenced a number of major poets of the 20th century and continue to be at the heart of poetic practice. (2) His Metro poem and his theory of the Image mark the beginnings of haiku in English.

Minimalism as we now know it originated with the Imagists especially Pound and William Carlos Williams; and Pound used visual and spatial techniques in his Metro poem and in his Cantos, techniques later embraced by the concrete poetry movement (circa 1950) though not necessarily attributed to him.

Pound was influenced by all of the arts, many other disciplines, philosophy and psychology in particular, and by a number of different cultures. He was sufficiently fluent in several languages to read in the original and translate. Chinese poetry and the Chinese written character were two of the more significant influences on him.

Pound was familiar with haiku, which he called hokku, haikai and tanka, as were most of the Imagists. He took a particular interest in the Noh drama, an interest he shared with W. B. Yeats. His understanding of the hokku, whether accurate or not, influenced his Metro poem, how he applied his definition of the Image if not the definition itself, and the way haiku would be viewed in the future.

Pound wrote an essay about his Metro poem in which he gives an account of its origin and its development. The article is entitled “Vorticism” which is a more strict form of Imagism and a term, like Imagisme, which Pound invented. (3)

A great deal has been written about Pound, his theories and his Metro poem. The main focus of this article will be whether or not Pound’s Metro poem is a haiku.

Pound calls his Metro poem “a hokku-like sentence.” Bruce Ross, editor of Haiku Moment, says it “is clearly an exercise in fabricated metaphor.” (4) William Higginson, author of The Haiku Handbook, Haiku World and Haiku Seasons, calls it “a haiku Shiki would have been proud to write.” (5) Most seem to agree it is his most haiku-like poem.

The four versions

Pound revised In a Station of the Metro three times creating four versions but he did not change a single word or the lineation (the division into lines). The event in the Metro itself occurred in 1911 and the poem took him over a year to write.

The first version was published in Poetry in April 1913 and again in New Freewoman on 15 August 1913, later renamed The Egoist:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition      of these faces      in the crowd:
Petals      on a wet, black bough.

Pound said, “I was careful, I think, to indicate spaces between the rhythmic units, and I want them observed.” (6) He said that “Rhythm MUST have meaning.” [Emphasis in the original] (7)

The spaces and the colon at the end of the first line determine the pace of the poem. Read aloud it sounds as if it is composed of five lines. In his Essay Pound does mention seeing five faces. The pauses and the diminishing syllable count until the last phrase (5/4/3/2/5 syllables) have the effect of slowing down the pace of the poem until the end when it picks up slightly.

Read a certain way it sounds as if the poet is searching, perhaps questioning his experience until the very end when he realizes something.

The intermittent reading of the phrases in each line can have a haunting quality to it. This is true whether haunted by beauty or haunted by a ghost.

In time with the spoken word, the five phrases appear one after the other like the faces in the crowd. In the second line, first the poet sees only petals . . . then he sees the wet, black bough. The word Petals is being emphasized and isolated both orally and visually.

The poem can be “read” vertically – if only in a visual sense. This does not generate another poem, reading or variation but it does emphasize and reorient the relationships between the elements of the two images: the petals become the apparition; the faces are on the wet, black bough; anyone in the crowd and the crowd itself is isolated and surrounded by empty space.

The two lines can be seen as the black bough; the spaces the petals: a kind of visual onomatopoeia.

Pound is clearly experimenting with alternate ways of reading a poem, and the physical relationship of the lines of the poem with each other and the surrounding space of the page, much like Mallarme (1842 – 1898) did in his last published poem, “A Dice Throw.” These kinds of concerns are at the heart of minimalist and concrete poetry.

Both the Chinese and the Japanese languages are written vertically; and in their visual arts, the space surrounding an object can be as important as the object itself, which is also an underlying principle of sculpture in the West. All of the techniques found or used in this version of Pound’s Metro poem were embraced by the concrete poetry movement (circa 1950) though not necessarily attributed to him. If any of these possibilities were unintended, one of the poem’s manifestations is as a found concrete poem.

In Personae (1926) the title of the poem appears in large block capitals and it may have appeared in this format elsewhere. (8) Creative use of capital letters is a concrete poetry technique but since the titles to all the poems in Personae are in block capitals, it appears to be a design feature of the book itself.

The second version was published in T.P’s Weekly on 6 June 1913 (9):

Pound closes the spaces and changes the line arrangement by indenting the second line. The poem can now be read in two-thirds the time of the first version. The picture of the bough and the petals is lost.

Higginson said the main effect of closing the spaces was to “smooth the rhythm” and make “the poem less choppy.”(10) Read correctly the rhythm of the first version is smooth and it is not choppy—just different. Yet its slow, gradual pace is inconsistent with the suddenness of the apparition (Pound’s words) and his definition of the Image as presented “in an instant of time.”

With the indented second line, the poem looks more symmetric. This is consistent with Pound’s view of hokku as a one image poem in which “one idea” is “set on top of another.”

Even though it is not as obvious, there is still a vertical relationship between the apparition and the Petals, and the faces and the black bough; and the expression “The . . . crowd” is isolated, having the same effect as before.

The third version appears in Pound’s Essay “Vorticism” published in Fortnightly Review on 1 September 1914 and republished in the April 1916 publication of Gaudier-Brzeska:

In his Essay Pound presents two Japanese haiku in translation in exactly the same form as his Metro poem, both with indented second lines and a colon. This suggests that it may have been a form he was using at the time, not so much a technique. Still, it says a lot about his perception of haiku.

The only change here is the addition of a comma after Petals. This appears to be grammatically incorrect although correct grammar can be irrelevant in poetry. Pound obviously wanted a pause after Petals and to isolate the word as before.

The fourth version appeared in Lustra in September 1916. It is the final version and the most familiar one. The comma after Petals is removed; a semi-colon substituted for the colon; and Pound reverts back to the traditional left-flush line arrangement:

In a Station of the Metro

    The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Since a colon can indicate a longer pause than a semi-colon, this along with the removal of the comma speed up the reading of the poem slightly. A vertical reading is still possible though visually less obvious. As in the first version, the two lines resemble the black bough and the phrase “in the crowd” is isolated.

This isolation and vertical juxtaposition of words or phrases by means of lineation and/or line arrangement, present in all of the versions of this poem in varying degrees, is both a product and a technique of vers libre, and an important technique in minimalist and concrete poetry. It emphasizes and creates new relationships between the component images and ultimately the possible readings of the poem, and is the visual equivalent of connecting words by sound. The effect becomes more significant and more intense the shorter the poem and the resulting vertical juxtaposition of words or phrases can imply a sense of identity between them. The technique itself can be emphasized as Pound did by spatial arrangement or, for example, by using different type face or different type size.

The change from the colon to the semi-colon is seen as a significant issue in deciding how to interpret the poem and whether or not it is a haiku.

A hokku like sentence

Whether or not a poem is a haiku may say nothing about its quality as a poem; and the senryu is not the only alternative.

Pound’s initial response to his “metro emotion,” the “lovely . . . sudden emotion” he felt on seeing the beautiful faces appear one by one in the crowd, was to express himself in paint “in little splotches of colour.” He called it “a pattern” and spoke of “arrangements” of colour, and referred to Kandinsky’s theories of colour, light, and form. He was thinking abstractly and wanted to evoke his emotion, not to describe it. He was not concerned with realism or presenting what he actually saw, only how to best present his emotion.

If the poet did not intend a poem to be a haiku then it can only be a found haiku. Pound called it “hokku-like” and in his Essay he makes it abundantly clear he was trying to write an Imagist poem based on his own theory of the Image, not a haiku; and that he only found his understanding of the hokku “useful” to help him out of his emotional “impasse.” Still, it has many of the characteristics of traditional and non-traditional urban haiku even if they are read into the poem.

The poem is written in free verse. Its form is short enough (19 syllables) to be a long, two line English haiku with a title. (English syllables are not the same as Japanese syllables.) No doubt Pound was familiar with the two line translations of Lafcadio Hearn (1900) and Basil Hall Chamberlain (1902) extant at the time. (11)

A two line form in English is consistent with the fact that a haiku is fundamentally a two image poem, image being defined in its broadest sense including simply naming something; and it is consistent with Japanese haiku which are usually divided into two rhythmic units by a cutting word, a form of division within the poem unique to the Japanese language and for which punctuation is an inadequate substitute. Pound was of the view that “Most hokku are bilateral.” (12)

The title is an essential part of the first image: an underground railway station with a dark tunnel in the background, which is the inverted image of the black bough. So the syllable count is really 8/12/7, for a total of 27, which is closer in length to a tanka (traditionally 31 Japanese syllables).

Especially during Basho’s time (1644 – 1694) a number of haiku had head notes (sometimes the equivalent of a title), which included introductions, dates and locations. (13) The hokku began a poem (haikai) which had a title; and when and where it was written is almost always known. In haibun (prose and poem) detail essential to a fuller and deeper understanding of the haiku is given in the preceding prose. It was Shiki (1867 – 1902) who insisted on the complete independence of the haiku, something which has been adopted in English, and is one reason why a title is often called the fourth line of a haiku.

Sound is very important in Japanese haiku but regrettably not so in English haiku. The poem is so very musical and the language intimately connected with sound, predominantly on a subliminal level and very subtly. Pound said in A Few Don’ts By An Imagiste:

                  It is not necessary that a poem should rely on its music, but if it does
                  rely on its music that music must be such as will delight the expert.
                  [Emphasis in the original] (14)

There is some rhyme, alliteration and assonance although it is more important to connect the sounds than to label them. (Generally the Imagists moved away from rhyme.) The result is a richly textured weaving of sound, unifying and interconnecting the principal elements of the images and redefining the relationships between them: The station is connected to the apparition; the apparition to the Petals; the Petals to the station; the Petals to the faces; the Petals to the black bough; the black bough to the crowd, and so on. Then consider the vowel sounds. These sound connections are another form of juxtaposition and can create a greater sense of identity between the component images.

The season is spring because the petals come from the blossoms of the black bough while the tree is in bloom, possibly late bloom because the petals would have fallen had they not been stuck to the wet, black bough. The petals are all the same colour since they came from the same tree.

All that is known about the tree is that it is fruit bearing with a black bark. Black is rare in nature. If the tree was known, early, mid or late spring could be specified. The black bough could be wet due to a light spring rain, mist or both. Mist is more in keeping with the underlying mystery of the poem – things seen through, veiled or cloaked in mist.

Spring implies hope, beginning, rebirth, beautiful, sudden, unexpected and surprising; life rising from decay; light coming out of the darkness. Petals suggest beauty, desire, passion, vulnerability, the feminine, the ephemeral transient nature of all things in the cycle of the seasons (the finite in the infinite); and the fact the petals are beginning to fall suggests the decline and death of the blossoms and the season itself. Springtime in Paris has its own associations.

The time of day can only be implied. Back then would morning and evening be the rush hours and the most likely times for a crowd in the Paris Metro? Spring alone without the time of day can imply morning. Then there is the dark Metro tunnel and the black bough, suggesting it is evening. Such ambiguity can create two poems that relate to each other, adding another level of juxtaposition.

The poem is written in the present tense with only nouns and two adjectives, both of them essential, consistent with Pound’s dictum on the subject: “No superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.” (15) There is no verb. The language is objective and very simple except perhaps for the word apparition. The emotion of the poem is unstated and intended to be evoked, something which is considered essential in haiku and Imagism. On rare occasions in both, emotion is explicitly stated.

There are two images in the poem juxtaposed together (Pound calls them two ideas). The heart of the poem is the interaction of these two images as it would be with any haiku.

The apparition is singular. This means that even though the poet may have seen the faces appear one by one, which is how Pound describes the actual event, it is “The apparition of these faces in the crowd” all at once that is presented as the first image. Pound does not say he saw them all at once, so the first image may have been imagined but it could be real. Nothing is revealed about the faces themselves or how many.

The second image, though vague in certain particulars, is a very clear visual image, easy to imagine: petals clinging to a wet, black bough—pink, red or white the obvious first choices, each colour giving the poem a different mood.

The poem is entitled “In a Station of the Metro” and since there were no blossoming trees in the Paris underground, the second image is in the poet’s mind and recalled when he sees the apparition in the station or it is imagined and brought to mind at the time.

There seems to be much debate about the meaning of the word “apparition,” which is pivotal in the poem. There are essentially two diametrically opposed meanings: the immaterial and the sensual. 1. An immaterial (incorporeal, spiritual, not consisting of matter) appearance as of a real being; a spectre, a ghost. 2. A phenomenon (highly exceptional and unaccountable, directly of the senses), remarkable, unexpected. (The Shorter O.E.D, 1973. The OED also says that the first definition is the current one and by implication it would have been current at the time the poem was written.)

The poem can accommodate all of these meanings. Immaterial, spectre, ghost: these mean the image is moving from the sensual into the realm of impressions and the imagination. The faces no longer seem real; they are ghost–like images emerging from the underworld. The second meaning can present an actual event: a phenomenon, the faces appearing together all at once, suddenly and unexpectedly out of the crowd—the black tunnel behind them. These possibilities add further layers to the poem and the interaction of these layers can be another form of juxtaposition. It is inconsistent with Pound’s definition of the Image that an Imagist poem can have only one possible meaning

When Pound calls his Metro poem a sentence he is stating the obvious. The poem including the title is a sentence with two words missing:

In a station of the Metro the apparition of these faces in the crowd
(is like) petals on a wet, black bough.

When this can be done so easily it strongly suggests that the poem is a fragmented sentence; and that the second image is a description of the first, implying it is a simile and not a metaphor, even if it can be read as one. A colon can also imply a simile although Higginson says in Pound’s Metro poem the colon makes the second image a metaphor of the first. (16) Lucien Stryk in his introduction to The Penguin Book of Zen Poetry calls the fourth version of the poem a simile, in which Pound uses a semi-colon. (16A)

A simile is the simplest relationship between two images and tends towards description rather than evocation. It presents image A only in terms of image B. A simile can be a perfect description and maybe even a perfect image but it is usually at best a weak metaphor. Generally a simile is ineffective in haiku because it does not express any kind of identity or contrast, and it does not present the images as existing independently of one another. Similes are found in haiku prior to Basho and in some modern Japanese haiku.

A sentence can be a poem and this issue lies at the heart of the prose versus poem-vers libre–free verse debate, which will be dealt with later in this series. William Carlos William’s The Red Wheelbarrow, for example, is a fragmented sentence. Like haiku, the sentence poem is a very difficult thing to do well. Many English haiku are fragmented sentences.

In his Essay, Pound is explicit and detailed in his description of the origin and development of his Metro poem. He refers to two Japanese hokku and it is most likely that they are his versions. Both are presented in the same form as the second version of his Metro poem. The first, given by Pound only as an example of a hokku, is by Moritake (1472 – 1549):

The fallen blossom flies back to its branch:
          A butterfly.

In a vertical reading the fallen blossom is directly above the butterfly. The two lines can be seen as the branch. A colon is used giving some indication of how Pound interpreted the relationship between the two images.

It is obvious Pound appropriated the second image for his Metro poem from the first line of Moritake’s poem. Over the years Pound has made a number of comments about appropriation from other poets.

In a letter to William Carlos Williams (1908) he said, “It is only good manners if you repeat a few other men to at least do it better or more briefly.” (His poem is certainly much better than Moritake’s.) In his essay “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” (1913) he says, “have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it.” (17) (Pound conceals it in his poem but acknowledges the debt outright in his essay.)

Whoever translated the poem missed the point and the colon is incorrect. R.H.Blyth translates it this way:

A fallen flower
Flew back to its branch!
No, it was a butterfly.

As Blyth says, “It was a momentary mistake.” (18)

If you add the word “like” to the second line of Pound’s version of Moritake’s poem, it becomes a sentence with a simile. This is not possible with Blyth’s translation.

Moritake was a Shinto priest and his poem was inspired by a line of scripture: “Can a fallen blossom return to its branch?” (19) This alludes to whether an enlightened man who has become disillusioned can become enlightened again, to which Moritake has added Chuang Tzu’s butterfly. The event could have happened. Doubtful it did. Obviously the poet wanted it to happen.

The second haiku was told to Pound and he added the words “are like . . . for clarity.” It was an actual event and the haiku was written in the moment. Pound said the poem was “roughly as follows,” which suggests this was in fact his version:

The footsteps of the cat upon the snow:
          (are like) plum blossoms.

Another sentence—another simile; and footsteps is certainly not the right word for the delicacy of the cat’s paw prints. Again, the colon is incorrect. Blame the translator, not the poet. There is in these (mistranslated) images a beautiful haiku.

Pound appears to see the haiku as a sentence and perhaps he models his Metro poem on what he saw as a hokku-like sentence, not a sentence he wrote that is hokku-like.

Pound summarizes what he takes from these two poems, his (mis)understanding of haiku and how it influenced him:

                  The ‘one image poem’ is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is
                  one idea set on top of another. I found it useful in getting out of the
                  impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion.

Haiku is really a two image poem, and the hokku Pound refers to in his Essay both have two images.

Haiku is not about ideation although ideas are expressed; and a haiku is certainly not made up of two ideas, which is why Moritake’s poem is not a haiku. Yasuda says it is. (20) Blyth says it is not even a poem. (21) Isoji Aso, a noted haiku scholar, has this to say about ideation and haiku:

                  What governs such an art [as that of haiku] is not a concept or logic,
                  feeling or rationalism . . . Even if we find an idea in it, that idea is
                  something diffused throughout the entirety of the art product, like the
                  air. (22)

For Pound “the Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.” (23)

Pound makes it clear in his Essay that he does not really understand haiku. What he says about his Metro poem though is true to his theory of the Image and Imagism: It is the whole poem that makes up the Image, not its component parts—and in that respect a haiku is a one Image poem; and Imagism is a process that has nothing to do with form or content, real or imagined—and in that respect many modern Japanese and English haiku conform with Imagist principles.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
In the second part of this three part article, Pound’s “theory of super-position,” Bruce Ross’s assertion that Pound’s Metro poem is a fabricated metaphor, and Bill Higginson’s view that it is a haiku will be the focus of the discussion.

In this article the terms hokku and haiku will be treated as synonymous, which is accurate.

Throughout this article any reference to Pound, the poem or what he said and so on, without a footnote after it, is from this essay, which will be referred to as the Essay.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Fluences is a section of troutswirl devoted to studying haiku, and haiku-like work, by 20th and 21st century western poets. Each installment will take a closer look at a poem, or a group of poems, by a poet who has either dabbled in haiku, been influenced by haiku, or whose work has had an influence, in some way or another, on 20th and 21st century English-language haiku.

Fluences is overseen by Nick Avis.