Issa wrote a hokku for the end of spring:
Sough, sough —
Spring departs;
The grass of the fields.
If you do not like the respectable old word sough for the rustling, sighing sound of the wind through the grasses, you might prefer something else that is onomatopoeic:
Sssss, sssss —
Spring departs;
The grass in the fields.
But actually, for me the first one is problematic because few people know the meaning or pronunciation of “sough” these days. And the “Sssss” of the second one might be just meaningless and confusing to readers untrained in hokku, who are not likely to intuit that it is the sound of the (unmentioned) wind in the grasses.
So I will go with a translation more obvious and easily grasped, yet very effective:
Departing spring;
The wind bends the grasses
Of the fields
Issa watches the high grasses in the fields, bending and sighing in waves as a gentle wind rustles across them, and he realizes that spring is ending.
Edward FitzGerald, in his reinterpretation of Omar Khayyam, saw the end of spring and expressed openly what is only latent in Issa:
Alas, that Spring should vanish with the Rose!
That Youth’s sweet-scented Manuscript should close!
The Nightingale that in the Branches sang,
Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows!
It is a lamentation of the passing of spring, and with it, of the passing of youth, the springtime of our lives. The days of our youth are a tale in a book with fragrantly-scented pages, but that brief story ends, that book closes, never to be opened again. That, of course, is metaphor.
To emphasize that finality, he gives another metaphor for the passing of something sweet, for the passing of springtime and youth: the nightingale that sang so beautifully, yet briefly, in the branches — where did it come from? And where has it gone? Why does he lament that spring vanishes with the rose? Because until relatively recent times, the roses of the Middle East and of Europe bloomed in the spring, and then were gone. When they went, so did spring. Our modern “ever-blooming” roses are the result of the introduction of previously unknown kinds and of hybridization into Europe and America.
We see some of the techniques of hokku in this, though used in a far more obvious way. We see the reflection of spring in the time of youth, and we find a very strong sense of transience, of the brevity of life as it passes. But hokku would never present these things in so obvious a manner. Instead, hokku just shows us something happening in Nature, and in that happening, as in Issa’s hokku, we feel everything expressed about that time of year, that time of life.
And of course with spring having passed, this means we are now in the season of summer hokku.
David
HOKKU 