It may seem odd that we can use some verses of Masaoka Shiki to demonstrate how to write hokku, given that Shiki provided the impetus for what became the erratic “haiku” movement, but as I have said many times, much of what Shiki wrote was just hokku under a different name. Shiki’s verses were in general quite different from all that people now know as modern haiku in English.
Here is one such verse, which is an autumn hokku. Usually I use my own translations, but in this case one can hardly better the translation by R. H. Blyth:
Peeling the pear,
Sweet drops trickle down
The knife.
Shiki was likely seeing an Asian pear (Pyrus pyrifolia), one of those yellowish round ones that have both a shape similar to an apple and something of its crispness. But the verse is even better in English, because we picture one of the more soft and juicy Western pears (Pyrus communis), which are what we traditionally think of as “pear-shaped.”
But the point I want to make today is what students of hokku can learn from this verse, which is in every respect not only a hokku but also quite a good one.
First, we can see that it has the necessary two parts of a hokku, one long, one short, separated in Japanese by a cutting word and in English by its functional equivalent, a punctuation mark.
1. Peeling a pear,
2. Sweet drops trickle down the knife.
Of course these are fitted into the standard English-language three-line hokku form.
The first part of the hokku functions as the setting. What is a setting in hokku? It is the overall environment or circumstance or context in which something takes place. In this verse that context — that situation — is “Peeling a pear.”
Next, this verse is quite typical of the most common hokku structure in that it has both a subject and an action, placed within the context of the setting.
The subject is “Sweet drops.”
The action (something moving or changing) is “…trickle down the knife.”
So that is it. An absolutely normal but quite good hokku written by the fellow people think of (somewhat confusedly) as the founder of the modern haiku movement, in spite of the fact that most of Shiki’s verses have little or nothing in common with much that is written as “modern haiku” in English and other European languages today.
The other respect in which this verse is a good model for hokku is that it simply shows us an event related to Nature (the pear and the sweet drops) and humans as a part of Nature (the peeling action and the knife). No commentary or explanation is added, and there is no symbolism or metaphor. And it has very good sensation. Remember that sensation in hokku is an experience of one or more of the five senses — seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling.
Think of it as seeing a closeup of the event in a clear mirror. It reflects exactly what is happening:
Peeling a pear,
Sweet drops trickle down
The knife.
Now imagine that the clear mirror is really the mind of the hokku writer. Just like a real mirror reflecting what is there, the writer presents us with just what is happening, without adding frills or comments, and does so in very simple, easy-to-understand, everyday language. That is what a writer of hokku does. He or she is a mirror reflecting events happening in the context of the seasons.
Blyth tells us that this verse is also an example of what he feels to be the “real function of poetry, — to hold the mirror up to nature in such a way that we perceive its workings.”
That is very different from what we are accustomed to in Western poetry, which often has quite a different purpose. But this verse does in fact show us, as Blyth says, “the nature of a pear, the nature of a knife, the relation between the two….”
All these are reasons why this verse makes a very good model for students of hokku — something that cannot be said of all of Shiki’s verses.
It is very important to keep in mind that hokku are written in one of the four seasons, and that the season is the underlying subject of the verse, which as a whole thereby expresses the character of that season. So when you write hokku in English or other non-Japanese languages, you should always mark them with the season in which they are written, like this:
(Autumn)
Peeling a pear,
Sweet drops trickle down
The knife.
David
HOKKU 