In both stirrups.

And here is a summer poem of Issa’s, with its pathos and humor:

Don’t worry, spiders,

I keep house

casually.

What are these haiku about? What mechanisms give rise to associations?

5. Though some haiku seem to contain only one image, most present an explicit or implicit comparison between two images, actions, or states of being. Identify the author of the following haiku and analyze some of them: explain the effect produced and the connotations received by separate objects due to the associations that emerge in the reader’s mind.

	Butterfly sleeping on the temple bell.		Green leaves, white water, the barley yellowing.		Zealous flea, you’re about to be a Buddha by my hand.
It’s not like anything they compare to – the summer moon.		In this world we walk on the roof of hell, gazing at flowers.					They don’t live long but you’d never know it – the cicada’s cry.
A wild sea – and flowing out toward Sado Island, the Milky Way.				A dog barking at a peddler: peach trees in blossom.			A huge frog and I, staring at each other, neither of us moves.
Mosquito at my ear – does it think I’m deaf?		A heavy cart rambles by and the peonies quiver.				A village without bells – how do they live? spring dusk.

6. Buson has a whole series of haiku verses beginning with the line “Spring rain” and “The short night”, showing different frames of mind, - like an Impressionist painter who depicts the same lily pond or haystack in different lights.

Try to give your own version of two haiku with these opening lines.

7. Which is easier and which is more effective: to suggest a feeling or to describe it in detail? Explain, provide examples (with your own examples among them!)

Supplement to lesson 7 “japanese poetry”

Basho during his forty-nine years, reinvented the forms of both the haiku and linked verse as they were practiced in his youth and gave them a power and seriousness they had rarely had before. BY his early thirties he was a haikai master and a professional teacher of poetry. Throughout his thirties he studies Chinese poetry and Taocism, and at least for a while, he studied Zen and practiced meditation. The poetry of those years took from the Chinese models a plainness and depth very different from the rather showy and playful poems in the Japanese tradition. By his forties, sick of literary life Basho began to travel and wrote the travel journals, mixtures of verse and prose, that have become classics of Japanese literature. it was in these last nine years of his life that he remade the haiku form, transforming it into one of the great lyric forms in human culture.

Japanese scholars are fond of contrasting Basho and Buson: Basho the seeker, Buson the artist; Basho the subjective poet, Buson the objective poet; Basho the ascetic writer, Buson the worldly painter.

Buson is that rare phenomenon, a great poet who was also a very distinguished painter. His poems are painterly in several senses. They are visually intense, many of them have a certain cool and powerful aesthetic detachment, and they are in love with color. There is a sense in them also of the world endlessly coming into being, as if it were brush strokes on white paper.

Issa – his name means “a cup of tea” or “a single bubble in seeping tea” - is a much-loved poet. He has been described as a Whitman or Neruda in miniature, probably because his poems teem with creaturely life, especially the life of the smallest creatures. His main English translator, a Scot, compares him to Robert Burns, who was almost his exact contemporary. And in other ways Issa’s sensibility resembles that of Charles Dickens – the humor and pathos, the sense of a childhood wound, the willingness to be silly and downright funny, and the fierceness about injustice. In his best work he is – for all the comparisons – quite unlike anyone else, the laughter cosmic, the sense of pain intense, as if the accuracy and openness of his observation left him with a thinness of the mind’s skin, with no defenses against the suffering in the world. Though he was a pious Buddhist and inclined to moralize in his prose, there is an interesting edge of rage in his poems, something very near cynicism. What is delightful about his insouciance casts a shadow.