How cool
My feet against the wall!
A midday nap.
And so begin the warm, drowsy days of summer.
Blyth makes an extremely important comment about this verse, one that clarifies precisely the relationship of hokku to poetry, and makes clear why it is misleading to speak of hokku as poetry. He says,
“If you ask where the poetry is in this verse, we can only answer, that there is a contact with things here that is of the essence of poetry.” He goes on to say, “…this verse of Bashô is only the seed of which poetry is the flower.”
Ah, if only people in the 20th century had paid close attention to Blyth! What he says is exactly the case. Hokku is not poetry in the conventional sense at all. It is more the seed from which poetry may grow. And how does it grow? There is poetry in us when we experience the sensation of the hokku for ourselves; that is the distinctive, primal poetry of hokku, the poetry of sensation, of the senses, that is — mere touching, tasting, smelling, hearing and seeing. It is not in the words but in the experience. But if one wants poetry as it is conventionally understood, one has to carry it farther, to work the contents of the hokku up into something more complex, and then it may be poetry as the world understands the term, but it is no longer hokku and its primal simplicity is lost.
This summer verse by Bashô is also a good example of yin and yang in hokku. Readers will recall that we generally feel this contrast more strongly in summer and winter, and Bashô’s verse presents that with immediacy in the hot feet (yang) of the writer suddenly feeling the coolness (yin) of the wall while relaxing (yin) in the middle of the day (yang). And the strength of the verse is in that contrast experienced directly.
This shows us also that while sometimes hokku may unintentionally achieve beauty (not in this hokku), it does not aim for it. It aims only for significance (found in this hokku). No one would conventionally consider putting one’s feet against a wall a “poetic” subject, but hokku enables us to feel the poetry in it, which is not at all the same as conventional poetry. We feel the poetry with our feet!
It is that joining of reader and the simple experience that creates the poetry of hokku, or as Blyth writes of Bashô, “He then expects us to take it and make it our own.” When we too feel our hot feet touch the cool wall, then we have made it our own and we have the primal poetry of hokku. The seed has flowered in us.
David
