It is amazing how much may be learned from R. H. Blyth if one only takes the time to read him carefully.  It is sad that when modern haiku was developing in the West in the 20th century, so little serious attention was given to all that Blyth offered — the bountiful treasury of information in his books.

Those of you who read my series on the Aesthetics of Hokku (look in the archives if you have not) will recall that asymmetry is one of the characteristics of hokku.  We can see that (in English) in its three-line form.

But Blyth has more to add.  He gives us a Chinese poem by Po Chu-i (known as Hakurakuten in Japan), which is pure hokku in its aesthetics.   Here is my translation:

NIGHT RAIN

A cricket chirps, then is silent;
The guttering lamp dims and brightens.
Ouside the window comes the evening rain;
It is heard first on the banana leaves.

Though it has the parallelism so characteristic of Chinese verse, Blyth shows us how we can extract two asymmetrical hokku from it.  I will vary what Blyth did somewhat, and use my own translations.

Hokku #1:

A cricket chirps,
And then is silent;
The guttering lamp.

Following Blyth, we could also arrange it as

The guttering lamp;
A cricket chirps,
Then is silent.

And we can extract also a second hokku, which as Blyth points out, is even more suitable to the form, being “the essence of the original poem” :

Evening rain;
It is heard first
On the banana leaves.

Banana leaves are wide and long, offering a generous surface for the pattering of raindrops.

Perhaps I am writing of this now because it has been raining on and off the past few days, and I have a young, hardy banana plant outside my window.  But in any case we can see the same events both in the symmetry of Chinese verse and in the asymmetry of hokku — but hokku focuses first on one part, and then on the other, separately and individually.  Both together are too much for the poverty of hokku, which requires a strong focus in a smaller space.

We can easily see from this example, however, how to write hokku-influenced longer verse.  That is why, as I mentioned in another posting, we could, if we wished, write a waka that is much more hokku-like in its aesthetics than traditional waka, and we could even write longer verses using the same approach.  And of course there is nothing to prevent us writing a sequence of related hokku, just as we derived two separate but related verses from the poem of Po Chu-i.

David