Haiku is regarded by many as the supreme achievement of Zen culture. The supposedly wordless doctrine of Zen has been accompanied throughout its history by volumes of koan riddles, sutras, and commentaries, but until Haiku was invented it had never enjoyed its own poetic form, nor might it ever have if the rise of popular Zen culture had not happily coincided with a particularly receptive stage in the evolution of traditional Japanese poetry—an accident seized upon by a great lyric poet of the early Edo period to create an exciting new Zen form. Haiku today is a worldwide cult, with California poets striving to capture in English the spareness and fleeting images that seem so effortless in the Japanese of the early Zen masters.
On first acquaintance Japanese seems an unlikely language for poetry. It is a syllabic tongue with each syllable ending in a vowel or the nasal n; consequently there are only five true rhymes in the entire language. Italian poets overcame a somewhat similar handicap, but their language is stressed, which Japanese is not. With no usable rhymes and no stress, how can the music of poetry be created? Over the centuries, the Japanese solved this problem by replacing meter with a system of fixed syllables—either five or seven—for each line. (This means that some lines of Japanese poetry may have only one word, but the system seems to work.) In place of rhyme, Japanese poets learned to orchestrate the pitch of individual vowels within a single line to give a sense of music. This device was illustrated by the American poet Kenneth Rexroth using a poem from the classical era. (The vowels are pronounced as in Italian.)
Fu-ta-ri yu-ke-do
Yu-ki su-gi ga-ta-ki
A-ki ya-ma wo
I-ka-de ka ki-mi ga
Hi-to-ri ko-ge na-mu
In his analysis of this particular poem, Rexroth has pointed out that the first and last lines contain all five vowels in the language, whereas the middle lines contain various combinations and repetitions, which produce a pronounced musical effect.1 The ability to create such music without rhyme, one of the finer achievements of Japanese poetry, is far more difficult than might at first be imagined and leads naturally to assonance, or the close repetition of vowel sounds, and alliteration, the repetition of similar consonant sounds. Some of the vowels have psychological overtones, at least to the sensitive Japanese ear: u is soft, a is sharp and resonant, o connotes vagueness tinged with profundity.2 Various consonants also convey an emotional sense in a similar manner.
Another clever device of the early Japanese versifiers was the use of words with double meanings. One example of this is the so-called pivot word, which occurs approximately halfway through a poem such as the above and serves both to complete the sense of the first part of the poem with one meaning and to begin a new sense and direction with its second meaning. This can at times produce a childish effect, and it does not always elevate the overall dignity of the verse. Another use of double meaning is far more demanding. Since the Japanese kana script is entirely phonetic and allows for no distinction in spelling between homonyms, words which sound alike but have different meanings, it is possible to carry two or more ideas through a poem. (A somewhat labored example in English might be, "My tonights hold thee more," "My two knights hold the moor." If these were written alike and pronounced alike, then the poem could mean either or both.) The first meaning may be a concrete example of a lover pining for his love, and the second a metaphor. Ideally, the two meanings support each other, producing a resonance said to be truly remarkable.
The early Japanese poets overcame the limitations of the Japanese language both by attuning their ears to the music of the words and by capitalizing on the large incidence of homonyms. They settled the matter of meter, as noted, by prescribing the number of syllables per line, with the principal form being five lines with syllable counts of 5,7,5,7, and 7. This thirty-one-syllable poem, known as the waka, became the Japanese "sonnet" and by far the most popular poetic form during the Heian era. Almost all a poet can do in five lines, however, is to record a single emotion or observation. The medium governed the message, causing Japanese poets early on to explore their hearts more than their minds. The waka became a cry of passion; a gentle confirmation of love; a lament for the brevity of blossoms, colored leaves, the seasons, life itself. A sampling of waka from the early classical era shows the aesthetic sense of the seasons and lyric charm of these verses.