HAIKU DIALOGUE – Literary Devices – allusion

Literary Devices with Guest Editor Alex Fyffe

For this series, I’d like to focus on the use of various literary devices in haiku. We tend to think of these techniques as applicable to longer lyric poetry – haiku is often taught to be a form without literary trappings, a simple breath of a poem, honest and straightforward, without ornament. Of course, this is a misconception, as the best haiku tend to be very carefully crafted, with one good poem often going through several revisions. And just like their longer cousins, haiku are capable of tackling metaphor, simile (despite what you might have heard), personification, symbolism, allusion, and any number of other techniques. Each week, we will take an in-depth look at a different technique and apply it to our haiku.

next week’s theme: repetition/parallelism

Another essential device used in poetry throughout the ages is repetition. We already saw one form of repetition show up in these prompts back when we wrote alliterative poems. But now I would like to look at the way poets repeat words or structures to create an effect.

Longer poems, of course, have somewhat of an advantage here. We all know that songs, for instance, tend to have choruses that repeat multiple times. The fool in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night sings a lyric that repeats the lines “With hey, ho, the wind and the rain” and “For the rain it raineth every day.” Similarly, some poems, like ballads, will often employ a refrain at the end of each stanza. In the first part of Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Lament for Ignacio Sanchez,” he repeats over and over again that the man died “at five in the afternoon,” hammering home the cruelty of that unforgettable hour.

Some forms of poetry even mandate repetition. A favorite of mine, the villanelle, I believe to be one of the more difficult forms to pull off effectively. But we have a couple of shining examples, the one everyone knows being Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” although I believe that Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking” gives it a run for its money.

Effective repetition, though, does not have to repeat entire lines of text. Sometimes, just a single word or short phrase repeated two or three times in a row can be equally effective. Edgar Allan Poe uses repetition to dramatic effect in several of his works, including “Dream Within a Dream,” in which he repeatedly cries out “O God!” and “While I weep – while I weep!” A bit too melodramatic for haiku, perhaps, but such is Poe.

One of Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquies uses single-word repetition effectively. Macbeth, mourning his wife’s death, says:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day…

And another line from this soliloquy: “Out, out, brief candle!” Here, the repetition of “Out, out” shows the speaker’s growing frustration. “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow… from day to day…” emphasizes Macbeth’s utter exhaustion with living at this point in the play. He has become a tired despot, having lost all his friends and loved ones, and his bitterness is palpable.

Parallelism is a form of repetition in which the structure of a line is repeated. One of the most well-known examples comes from Alfred Lord Tennyson. His poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is full of parallel lines:

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them…

Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of hell…

Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade…

You can see how Tennyson repeats the same type of phrase, changing essential words. “Into the jaws of Death,” for instance, is a prepositional phrase, as is “Into the mouth of hell.” Only the nouns have changed. Like Poe, Tennyson may be a bit too intense in his usage for haiku poets to emulate, but the idea is the same. Repeating the structure can draw emphasis to an idea. Some other examples of parallel structure might be:

from dusk
till dawn

out of the frying pan
into the oven

biding my time
living my life

We do see repetition in haiku. One of my favorite Basho poems uses it (translations the work of the author):

年々や猿に着せたる猿の面
toshi doshi ya / saru ni kisetaru / saru no men

Even without knowing Japanese, you can see the repetition of toshi doshi (lit. “year year,” trans. “year after year”) and of saru (lit. “monkey”), which starts the seven on and the final five on “lines” of the haiku. It might be translated as:

year after year
the monkey wears
a monkey mask

(Note: “mask” could also be translated as “face.”)

Here, Basho has repetition as his theme, with “year after year” emphasizing the ongoing plight that he is about to illustrate. The monkey will always wear the face of a monkey. Perhaps the monkey is essentially empty, as per Buddhist teachings, and yet it will continue to identify as a monkey, as all things seem to continue to identify with the masks they wear.

Issa also used repetition to powerful effect in his haiku lamenting the impermanence of life (a topic he was sadly intimate with):

露の世は露の世ながらさりながら
tsuyu no yo wa / tsuyu no yo nagara / sari nagara

Again, the repetition is clear: tsuyu no yo, or “world of dew,” gets repeated in the first two “lines,” and nagara (“although,” or “despite that,” famously translated as “and yet…”) ends both “lines” two and three. It might be translated as:

this world of dew
is a world of dew, but even so,
even so…

Not as melodramatic as Poe, nevertheless this poem achieves a similar effect, dramatizing the pain of losing a loved one. The repetition shows just how hard it is for the speaker to let go, despite his awareness of impermanence.

For this prompt, make effective use of repetition and/or parallelism in a haiku or senryu.

The deadline is midnight Central Daylight Time, Saturday August 20, 2022.

Please use the Haiku Dialogue submission form below to enter one or two original unpublished haiku inspired by the week’s theme, and then press Submit to send your entry. (The Submit button will not be available until the Name, Email, and Place of Residence fields are filled in.) With your poem, please include any special formatting requirements & your name & residence as you would like it to appear in the column. A few haiku will be selected for commentary each week. Please note that by submitting, you agree that your work may appear in the column – neither acknowledgment nor acceptance emails will be sent. All communication about the poems that are posted in the column will be added as blog comments.

below is Alex’s commentary for allusion:

For the allusion selections, I thought it would be fun (and/or educational) to separate them by type. There were many literary allusions, including references to specific haiku, but also a wealth of allusions to myths/religions, artists and artworks, music and musicians, and historical figures, places, and events. In addition, there were a couple of allusions to film and a few to current events. You will see them listed under these various headings below. But first, I’d like to highlight some that connected with me.

oh, snail, at my age
we should reach the hilltop
together

Tomislav Maretić
Croatia

Most of the entries that allude to haiku drew from Basho or, as in this case, Issa. In fact, this poem in particular came up a few times in the submissions. This take on the classic haiku stood out because of the way Maretić becomes a kind of walking companion to the snail, both of them slowly making progress toward their destination side by side. I think Issa would approve of the empathy shown to his snail.

Other literary allusions ranged from Poe to Salinger, Brontë to Woolf, Shakespeare to Dickinson, and Dante to Plath. It’s not surprising, of course, that a group of poets would take inspiration from other writers, but it was wonderful to see the wide range of influences on display.

William, it’s too late
and Summer- nodaffodils
undance in the breeze

Sarah Davies
Bedford, UK

Davies references Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” but there is a lot going on here. First, she directly addresses the author, a literary device known as apostrophe. Then she responds to his springtime poem from her vantage point of late summer, removing us from the airy feeling of his work and setting an anxious tone. Next, I notice the traditional way of capitalizing important nouns, like Summer, in the manner of someone like Dickinson, followed immediately by two E. E. Cummingsesque compounds, “nodaffodils / undance,” blending both the traditional and the modern together very quickly. You can see this, as well, in the fact that the poem is a “traditional” 5-7-5 haiku, even though it feels very modern in its approach. Her poem completely negates the softness of Wordsworth’s; the daffodils are gone, and there is no more dancing to be seen.

when will we work out
it was never

the wheelbarrow
it was

the rain…

Adele Evershed
Wilton, Connecticut

Multiple poets also tackled one of the well-known haiku-like works by William Carlos Williams. Evershed takes the approach of mimicking Williams’s line breaks in her response, which recenters the focus away from the wheelbarrow and onto the rainwater that glazes it. After all, so much depends upon the rain.

Trojan horse
I wait for the signal
to spill my secret

Cynthia Anderson
Yucca Valley, California

Several different religious/mythic traditions are represented in the entries, but the Greco/Roman stories are the most common. This particular one could have also been classified as a literary allusion to Homer’s The Odyssey, but there were enough literary allusions already, so I labeled references to Homer’s works under mythic allusions. I love the way Anderson sets up the reference to the famous Trojan horse – we know the soldiers are waiting inside until the time is right to come out and slaughter the revelers. But in the final line, we realize she is the Trojan horse, carrying not soldiers but a terrible secret of some kind, one that is just waiting to come out and wreak havoc – upon a friend, a lover, a family member. The allusion helps us to understand that the secret’s unveiling will have devastating results, even if we don’t know the precise details.

There was a lot of love for art and music, too. I saw allusions to Dylan, Bowie, Dali, Hokusai, Picasso, Rothko, The Rolling Stones, and more. Van Gogh might have received the lion’s share of attention, though.

Van Gogh portraits…
my husband only
half listens to me

Sangita Kalarickal
USA

Of the Van Gogh poems, this was my favorite. Kalarickal plays with the knowledge we have of Van Gogh’s missing ear, as seen in a famous self-portrait, to half-humorously, half-seriously, convey her husband’s inattentiveness. There is a delightful pleasure in the play of words and a slight sorrow in the realization that she isn’t being fully heard.

drooping camellias
as if Lady Yang
had passed by

(Lady Yang: one of the four great beauties of ancient China who was said to have a face that put all flowers to shame)

Jackie Chou
USA

Chou’s historical allusion to Lady Yang was a favorite of mine. The poem starts with a precise natural image of “drooping camellias,” and then it uses the allusion to personify the flowers; now we see them as not just drooping but hanging their heads in shame, knowing they will never be as beautiful as this great beauty.

children’s games
I reenact the cold war
with my sister

Colette Kern
Southold, New York

Kern’s poem works two ways. It alludes to the Cold War to show how the siblings are not getting along, giving one another the cold shoulder, perhaps. But it also implies that the US and Russia were like children, playing an immature “game” with each other, the cold shoulder on an international level, which also reminds me of Peter Gabriel’s “Games Without Frontiers.”

stabbed in public …
free speech
still has a pulse

Daipayan Nair
Silchar, India

Finally, this poem alludes to a very recent event in which a famous writer was stabbed because of what he had written. It is a reminder that language is powerful and that the freedom of speech is something worth defending and which must be protected, because there will always be those who try to cut it down out of some misguided, blind rage.

& here are the rest of the selections:

Haiku Allusions

inner
devices
outer
devices
Haiku
Dialogue

Robin Rich
Islands in the Atlantic Ocean

 

on top of Mount Fuji
where to go next
little snail

Deborah Karl-Brandt
Bonn, Germany

 

summer dawn –
the crow rattling
an august branch

Herb Tate
UK

 

spattered by a gull
I hear the raucous cackle
of Issa’s ghost

John Hawkhead
UK

 

you lazy horsefly
just sitting on the sill —
what would Issa do?

Mark Meyer
Mercer Island, Washington

 

water there may or may not have been a frog

Louise Hopewell
Australia

 

scorched riverbed
I hear the white cry
of a wild duck

Meera Rehm
UK

 

planting spring bulbs
I might be Buddha
tomorrow

Matt Cariello
Bexley, Ohio

 

a gun is fired
the echoes and re-echoes
in city streets

Richard Straw
Cary, North Carolina

 

splash
the sound
of his ashes

Florin C. Ciobica
Romania

 

Literary Allusions

dharma bums a cigarette

Bryan Rickert
Belleville, Illinois

 

amontillado–
the brick wall of the shelter
scrapes our backs

Morley Cacoethes
Cleveland, Ohio

 

Whitman
in the grass
my solitude grows

Alvin Cruz
Philippines

 

a still raven
above the Pallas bust
noisy courtroom

Neena Singh
Chandigarh, India

 

marriage breakup
the parting sorrow
not so sweet

Carol Reynolds
Australia

 

Kafka’s insect…
crawling
to my dark side

Bakhtiyar Amini
Germany

 

magpie
on the border fence-
one for sorrow

andrew shimield
UK

 

waiting for
(what’s-his-name ah yes Godot) . . .
the moon to fill in

Alfred Booth
France

 

summer break
it begins with a hobbit
living in a hole

Sushama Kapur
Pune, India

 

alone on the beach
me and a seagull
I name it Jonathan

Ram Chandran
India

 

Gollum I love your precious heart

Susan Burch
Hagerstown, Maryland

 

Monday morning–
abandoning all hope
at the badge machine

Ruth Holzer
Herndon, Virginia

 

anniversary
I still believe
in my Godot

Tsanka Shishkova
Bulgaria

 

painting the roses black her goth phase

Kimberly Kuchar
Austin, Texas

 

Morning Song
the first stay
of a name

Richa Sharma
India

 

school desk
finding between pages
the road not taken

Minal Sarosh
Ahmedabad, India

 

I follow
the trail of wildflowers
the road less traveled

Pravat Kumar Padhy
India

 

Broken sat nav:
the road less travelled by
leads to a dead end

Jenny Shepherd
London, UK

 

pleated ink cap…
writing a page in the ashes
of her ballgown

Laurie Greer
Washington, DC

 

girls who wear glasses
can see right through
the boys who make passes

Sari Grandstaff
Saugerties, New York

 

the jogger
bumped into me
reader, I married him

Ann Rawson
Scotland, UK

 

cancer on remission the road from La Mancha

Bona M. Santos
Los Angeles, California

 

returning home
the age
of anxiety

John Pappas
USA

 

big poem book
tasting Joy’s grape
at five years old

Kath Abela Wilson
Pasadena, California

 

so little rides
on the rusted wheelbarrow
wet with rain

Helen Ogden
Pacific Grove, California

 

croaking
when no one’s near –
Cinderella’s prince

Dan Campbell
Virginia, USA

 

it’s midnight—
eight prawns under,
that Cheshire smirk

Rupa Anand
New Delhi, India

 

my first taste
of scones and clotted cream
…Enid’s girls

Baisali Chatterjee Dutt
Kolkata, India

 

Ozymandias
inside the ants’ nest
nothing but sand

James Gaskin
Fukushima, Japan

 

i heard a fly buzz —
the bedside vigil
of best loved poems

Roberta Beary
USA/Ireland

 

season of mists . . .
the sharp sting of
a dying wasp

Lori Kiefer
London, UK

 

clouds of dust
wheel above
nine-and-fifty swans

Bittor Duce Zubillaga
Basque Country

 

croaking frog–
it really is dismal
to be Somebody

Lafcadio
USA

 

staring at cellphones
light and shadows
in Plato’s cave

Herbert Shippey
Tifton, Georgia

 

apparitions
of hungry faces
& all the trains have gone

Ash Evan Lippert
USA

 

good night, sun
the sky and clouds blush
at his moon pajamas

Anette Chaney
Harrison, Arkansas

 

Religious/Mythic Allusions

snake
in her eyes and mine
Minoan splendor

Lynda Zwinger
Tucson, Arizona

 

driftwood
half buried in the sand
my Achilles’ heel

Hifsa Ashraf
Rawalpindi, Pakistan

 

narcissi clogging the arteries of her echocardiogram

Pippa Phillips
Kansas City, Missouri

 

Crocodile River
I am caught between
Scylla and Charybdis

Chen Xiaoou
Kunming, China

 

catch-22
waiting for the sea
to part

Ravi Kiran
India

 

Perseids night –
all people have it
that hopeful look

Danijela Grbelja
Sibenik, Croatia

 

the boy child
my house fills with
Krishna’s mischief

Nitu Yumnam
India

 

bundled letters
on a closet shelf
Pandora’s curse

Jonathan Epstein
Los Angeles, California

 

heatwave
a tern flies too close
to the sun

Mariel Herbert
California, USA

 

Garden of Eden –
the scent of jasmines
fills the air

Daniela Misso
Italy

 

headless kali
all her carcasses
on auction

Kashiana Singh
USA

 

rain shadow
coyote and raven
playing tag

C.R. Harper
USA

 

continuing a life
of murk and dirt
turned to swine

C.X. Turner
UK

 

Odysseus struggles
to go home
PTSD

Nancy Brady
Ohio, USA

 

once again
Pandora opens her box . . .
climate change

Valentina Ranaldi-Adams
Fairlawn, Ohio

 

our words not wasted
at each other’s feet
spikenard

Geoff Pope
Paducah, Kentucky

 

flooding town
two by two
into a tinny

Maurice Nevile
Canberra, Australia

 

seeking redemption
after the storm has cleared
ark of a rainbow

Marcia Burton
Salt Spring Island, Canada

 

Exodus
a sea of sunflowers
parting

Barrie Levine
Massachusetts, USA

 

stone boat
in the overgrown field
Theseus’ dandelions

ron scully
Burien, Washington

 

Art Allusions

shaved ice’s
syrup slathered slopes—
red Fuji

Stephen J. DeGuire
Los Angeles, California

 

starry night…
a flock of crows rises
from the wheat field

Minerva Pendleton
Ohio, USA

 

waiting room
health reports yet to come
Guernica on the wall

Chittaluri Satyanarayana
Hyderabad, India

 

hot summer . . .
Van Gogh’s sunflowers
on the wall

Rosa Maria Di Salvatore
Catania, Italy

 

the weeping woman
how we continue
to water the war!?

Daya Bhat
India

 

Guernica . . .
and yet
Ukraine this spring

Sonam Chhoki
Bhutan

 

starry night—
two teaspoons of sugar
in my coffee

Andrew Markowski
San Antonio, Texas

 

first visit to
Musée de L’Orangerie
i float with the lilies

Susan Farner
USA

 

Segantini’s light—
looking over the lake
we fall silent

Helga Stania
Switzerland

 

my husband
drifts into a daydream
Aphrodite’s statue

Arvinder Kaur
Chandigarh, India

 

almost ghostly
as Namatjira’s gums…
backyard bleached birch

(Albert Namatjira is a well-known Australian artist who lived in Central Australia. His paintings often featured Ghost Gums, so called because of the white bark.)

Madhuri Pillai
Australia

 

stop writing Rothko

Adrian Bouter
The Netherlands

 

sea of fog
dad’s mind wanders back
to himself

Mona Iordan
Romania

 

post op fog
the clock on the wall becomes
a Dali timepiece

Sharon Martina
Warrenville, Illinois

 

Music Allusions

autumn rain
Billie Holiday’s swing
still swinging…

Tony Williams
Scotland, UK

 

croissant moon
Cohen and coffee
at the kitchen table

Alan Peat
Biddulph, United Kingdom

 

rebel’s
rebel
bowie

Helen Buckingham
UK

 

Mt Fuji
our old album
blowing in the wind

Anna Yin
Ontario, Canada

 

bees keep buzzing good vibrations

Eavonka Ettinger
Long Beach, California

 

underexposing
his grief
you want it darker

marilyn ashbaugh
Edwardsburg, Michigan

 

Four Seasons
the time it takes
to answer the call

Keith Evetts
Thames Ditton, UK

 

Bach’s Requiem
the widow’s
unshed tears

Margaret Mahony
Australia

 

Small sparrow sings
in the Paris dust,
no regrets

Caroline Ridley-Duff
UK

 

gathering no moss
the black door
that was once painted red

Sue Courtney
Orewa, New Zealand

 

chameleon
wearing her outside face…
jar of colours

Carole Harrison
Jamberoo, Australia

 

cockatiel
concerto
outside of Cage

petro c. k.
Seattle, Washington

 

low-key coffee shop
the Dead doing a live version
of “Not Fade Away”

Tim Cremin
Massachusetts, USA

 

back from the barber’s
smelling of
just a gigolo

Ella Aboutboul
West Sussex, England

 

Historical Allusions

Hiroshima Day –
a thousand paper lanterns
glowing on the lake

Deborah A. Bennett
Carbondale, Illinois

 

an ant
on the edge of the bouquet …
Moebius strip

una formica
sull’orlo del bouquet…
nastro di Moebius

Angiola Inglese
Italy

 

waiting
for the big crash
Y2K

Roberta Beach Jacobson
Indianola, Iowa

 

a woman alone
with a glass of Veuve Clicquot –
bliss of solitude

Natalia Kuznetsova
Russia

 

Sanchi Stupas
relics of an incense float
in the air

साँची स्तूप
हवा में बहती
अगरबत्ती की राख

Teji Sethi
India

 

Trail of Tears
drowning myself
in winter rain

Mona Bedi
Delhi, India

 

great wall –
the pier
collapses

Amoolya Kamalnath
India

 

the address
of he who perished
Gettysburg

Margaret Tau
New Bern, North Carolina

 

stroke of midnight
sleepwalking to find
stained khadi cap

Krishna Palle
Chennai, India

 

Chipko
the old man’s love
for the family oak

Ingrid Baluchi
North Macedonia

 

the smell of terror
wrapped in bullet marks
Leo Pol Cafe

Padma Rajeswari
Mumbai, India

 

Sun Studio…
thumbing the guitar pick
in my pocket

Joshua Gage
Cleveland, Ohio

 

¡Sí se puede! … the colors of hope

Peggy Bilbro
Alabama, USA

 

Modern Events Allusions

trigger laws
the barrel always aimed
at women

Tracy Davidson
Warwickshire, UK

 

a reptilian rogue petrified in primeval mire Putin

John S Green
Bellingham, Washington

 

Movie Allusions

the dark side
just as strong
my dream self

Kanjini Devi
The Far North, Aotearoa

 

10 print “all work and no play . . . ”
20 goto 10
run

P. H. Fischer
Vancouver, Canada

Guest Editor Alex Fyffe teaches high school English in the Houston area. Although he has been writing haiku off and on for a decade, he only started submitting his work during the Global Event known as 2020. Since then his haiku and senryu have been published in various journals, including Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Failed Haiku, Akitsu Quarterly, and the Asahi Haikuist Network. Alex’s first glimpse of haiku was in a collection of writings by Jack Kerouac, and he found the work of Issa while studying abroad in Japan, but he didn’t fall in love with the haiku until he discovered the free-form work of Santoka Taneda. Currently, Alex uses haiku in the classroom to ease students into poetry and build their confidence as readers and writers. Alex also posts haiku on Twitter @AsurasHaiku.

Lori Zajkowski is the Post Manager for Haiku Dialogue. A novice haiku poet, she lives in New York City.

Managing Editor Katherine Munro lives in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, and publishes under the name kjmunro. She is Membership Secretary for Haiku Canada, and her debut poetry collection is contractions (Red Moon Press, 2019). Find her at: kjmunro1560.wordpress.com.

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