Moon and Finger 14 – Simile Part 1
Welcome to Moon and Finger, a feature for addressing and discussing any haiku topic under the sun, in depth, but particularly haiku poetics. The feature is hosted by Orense Nicod and Keith Evetts, and eventually, we hope, by a variety of occasional invited guests. We aim to make it varied and challenging, serious and amusing. Host today is Orense Nicod.
Simile and the Mechanics of Ma
Part I: Simile as Buffer
The prejudice against simile in English-language haiku is difficult to state precisely, as even its most authoritative formulations reveal. In “Metaphor, Simile and Stylistic Ornament,”an essay included in the British Haiku Society’s Reference Section, George Marsh declares flatly that “haiku do not use metaphors and similes,” only to immediately qualify this as “a rule with a number of notable exceptions.” The Haiku Society of America, meanwhile, states that simile and metaphor are “commonly avoided” while conceding that they “do sometimes occur.” What unites these statements, and many more, is not clarity but discomfort: a sense that simile ought to be excluded from haiku, combined with an inability to say precisely why, or to ignore the evidence that the masters used it anyway.
It is worth acknowledging that this orthodoxy emerged from legitimate concerns. This avoidance of simile arose partly as a pedagogical corrective — a guardrail against the tendency of Western poets, trained in a tradition that prizes figurative language as evidence of poetic intelligence, to reach instinctively for simile and metaphor even when directness would serve the poem better. The rule against simile is a useful simplification for poets learning to unlearn their habits, a way of clearing the ground so that something closer to the form’s actual spirit can emerge.
The problem is that guardrails for beginners have a tendency to calcify into laws for everyone. What began as a corrective became a prohibition, and the prohibition was then projected backward onto the tradition itself — causing critics to discount or explain away the evidence of simile in the masters, and practitioners to treat an inherited caution as a universal aesthetic principle. This series of linked essays does not argue against the corrective impulse. It argues that the corrective has overreached and that in guarding against figurative excess it has ruled out a device that the tradition’s greatest poets used precisely and deliberately.
But the suspicion of simile in English-language haiku has yet deeper roots. It is the local intensification of a suspicion that runs through the entire Western literary tradition — ancient, persistent, and so deeply embedded that it has rarely needed to be argued because it has never been seriously questioned.
Aristotle set the terms in the Rhetoric (Book III, Chapter 10, translated by W. Rhys Roberts, 1924):
“The simile, as has been said before, is a metaphor, differing from it only in the way it is put; and just because it is longer it is less attractive. Besides, it does not say outright that ‘this’ is ‘that’, and therefore the hearer is less interested in the idea.”
Aristotle doesn’t entirely dismiss simile; he goes on to admit that it has its uses. But the hierarchy is already clear: metaphor is more immediate because it says “this” is “that,” while simile is longer and more mediated. That hierarchical ordering — metaphor as the more sophisticated instrument, simile as its diluted cousin — has persisted with remarkable consistency through two millennia of Western poetics. The Romantics elevated the symbol and the image. The New Critics prized compression and the fusion of meaning. I.A. Richards, Empson, and later theories of metaphor placed metaphor at the centre of poetic and cognitive inquiry. The imagists inherited this preference and transformed it into a poetic prescription: direct treatment of the thing, no unnecessary word. The result was an aesthetic that valued the intensity of identification over the explicit mediation of comparison.
The disparity in critical attention is itself revealing. Metaphor has accumulated an enormous theoretical apparatus — from Aristotle through Ricoeur, from Richards through Lakoff and Johnson, through cognitive poetics and conceptual metaphor theory and the philosophy of language. Simile has no equivalent apparatus. It has been examined almost exclusively in relation to metaphor, as a variant or lesser form, rarely as an independent phenomenon with its own properties, its own poetics, its own irreducible way of operating in language. That absence is not accidental. It is the trace of a bias so thoroughly inherited that it has prevented the question from being properly asked.
As English-language haiku developed, in part, through an Imagist filter, it carried this Western inheritance with it and then encountered a Japanese aesthetic that appeared to confirm it — the directness, the image, the unmediated presentation of the thing itself. What it missed was that the Japanese tradition’s directness was never a prohibition on explicit comparison but a principle of attentiveness that simile could serve as faithfully as any other technique. Haiku’s sparing use of figurative language has been mistaken for a judgment on its value — as though the form had considered simile and found it wanting. But haiku does use figures of speech, including simile, and the masters used them deliberately, precisely, when the moment required them and not otherwise. This is not a prescription against particular techniques but something more demanding and more intelligent: an attentiveness to what each moment requires, a refusal to reach for any device — including juxtaposition — out of habit or orthodoxy rather than necessity. Prescriptions against particular techniques commit precisely the kind of separation haiku otherwise resists. They separate language from message in an artificial way, treating the instrument as though it were independent of what it is asked to do, as though the like were always and everywhere the same gesture regardless of the poem it appears in and the moment it serves.
The result of this misreading is a prohibition more absolute than either tradition separately would have produced — a compound prejudice carrying the apparent authority of two literary cultures.
The full extent of this intensified suspicion can be measured in a single passage from Lee Gurga writing in Haiku: A Poet’s Guide. His position is not an isolated extreme but something close to the dominant view within English-language haiku.
“The use of overt simile or metaphor most often has a limiting rather than freeing effect on a poem. One might go as far as to say that there is no place for simile in haiku. If a thing is like something else, then best to talk about that other thing in the first place.”
This is an extraordinary statement, because it contradicts both haiku’s nature as a form built around relational meaning and the haiku tradition itself, which clearly contains simile.
For the history of haiku itself suggests otherwise: simile, far from being a failure of subtlety, can at times serve as a precise and necessary instrument. The masters show us that explicit comparison need not diminish resonance, but can instead help to shape it—guiding perception, preserving distance, and giving contour to the space of ma.
Simile is rarer in haiku partly because it is more demanding: more explicit, more vulnerable to discursiveness, more likely to collapse when the comparison is weak. The form’s brevity gives it a natural affinity for juxtaposition and metaphorical compression, and those affinities are real. The argument here is not that simile is superior to either, nor that it should be used more often. It is that simile should be understood as one legitimate instrument among others — with powers that neither juxtaposition nor metaphor can fully replace — and that the bias against it has prevented those powers from being clearly seen.
This series of essays, which is in fact one continuous argument presented in parts, will address the various facets of simile through close readings of the poems of the Masters and other Japanese haiku poets. In this way it seeks to recontextualize the role of simile in haiku, showing that simile is not a weakness but a deliberate and nuanced means of framing experience. We will address the prejudice against simile in its haiku-specific form. But the question the argument asks — what is simile, what does it do, what can it achieve that other techniques cannot — is not haiku-specific. The haiku context made the question visible and gave it its particular urgency. The answer, as the close readings will show, extends considerably further and in taking the device seriously illuminates not only the mechanics of simile but the mechanics of the haiku form itself.
1. Simile, Metaphor and Juxtaposition
But before further exploring simile’s precise uses, it is necessary to understand how it differs from metaphor and from juxtaposition—not merely in degree of explicitness, but in kind as a difference in how the mind processes relation. I will be using a heuristic distinction, which is not an attempt to settle the larger and still-divisive debates about what metaphor actually is. For our purposes, it is enough to observe the different ways simile and metaphor position the things they bring together.
Following Aristotle, simile and metaphor have often been treated as essentially the same operation, differing only in how directly they announce the comparison, and therefore as largely interchangeable. There is some truth in this: both establish a relation between things, and the line between them can blur in practice. Yet the view that they differ only in degree obscures something important. Simile and metaphor do not just vary in explicitness; they operate differently at the level of cognition and produce different effects in the reader.
A simile acknowledges likeness while preserving separation. It holds two things in relation without fusing them: A is like B. The mind remains aware of two distinct entities, and the comparison is experienced as a thought—mediated, conscious, held between two things that remain themselves. A metaphor, by contrast, enacts a fusion: A is B. It does not invite the reader to compare but to transform—to experience, however briefly, two things as a single field of meaning. The difference is not merely rhetorical; it concerns how the relation is experienced: whether as a recognized similarity or as a momentary reconfiguration of what things are.
As Lakoff and Johnson’s work on conceptual metaphor suggests, metaphor is deeply embedded in ordinary human meaning-making. It is cognitively efficient in the best sense: it allows us to organise one thing through another quickly and with force. Simile is more demanding. It keeps both entities active and requires the reader to manage the distance between them, to hold the comparison open rather than resolving it immediately into identification.
Juxtaposition, by far the dominant technique in haiku, complicates this picture. It states no comparison at all, placing two images side by side and leaving their relation unspoken. In practice, however, an unspecified relation that invites comparison tends to be resolved through identification rather than simile, because metaphor is often the faster and more instinctive operation. Without an explicit signal directing the reader to compare, the mind moves toward integration—toward experiencing the two images as a single field of meaning rather than holding them in deliberate relation. The pressure toward immediacy in a short form like haiku intensifies this tendency. There is little time or space for the managed distance that simile requires.
petal on water—
a drifting thought
Metaphor delivers its recognition in a flash: he reader does not pause to construct an implicit “like”. The identification arrives first; the comparison, if it is noticed at all, emerges only afterward through reflection.
There is also a subtler aesthetic incentive at work. Metaphor feels like discovery—a sudden collapse of distance into identity. Simile can feel almost like backtracking. It seems weaker because it reduces the intensity of the connection the reader has just made. However, this remains only a tendency and the primacy of metaphor is not absolute. When the leap between images is too great, uncomfortable, or context-dependent, juxtaposition may fail to produce metaphoric fusion, leaving the images in a relation closer to likeness than identity. But it is a less immediate and less predictable outcome.
2. Tethering the moment
This tendency of juxtaposition to generate identification is generally one of haiku’s great strengths—the source of much of its immediacy and resonance. But poetically it is not without risk. When two images collapse too completely into one another, the result can feel overly neat, overly precious, or too eager to resolve itself. The openness of the poem narrows; what initially seemed suggestive becomes fixed.
In such cases, simile can serve a necessary purpose. By preserving the distinction between two things, it resists the total collapse of images into a single meaning. It allows the poet to guide the reader toward a relationship without exhausting it. It is this capacity—to shape and calibrate the space between images rather than closing it—that will concern us in what follows. To illustrate, our first example is a haiku by Takahama Kyoshi:
白酒の紐の如くにつがれけり
shirozake no himo no gotoku ni tsugare kerithe sweet white sake
poured out
like a cord
The image evokes the thick, slow movement of the shirozake — a sweet, thick white sake traditionally served in spring, especially during Hinamatsuri — as it pours from bottle or ladle into the cup, visually resembling a cord or rope. The simile (marked by no gotoku) is not there to explain the poem, but to anchor the visual image. It helps the reader see how the sake moves—something that a plain juxtaposition might not convey as immediately or vividly:
the sweet sake
is poured out—
a white cord
In this version the relationship becomes much heavier. The juxtaposition tends to create identification: the sake is the rope, which produces a more forceful metaphor, but also a more fixed one. Rather than first seeing the pouring motion and then exploring the implications of the comparison, the reader is pushed immediately toward fusion.
Paradoxically, this can lessen the resonance of the image. Some of the reader’s attention is diverted toward reconstructing the visual logic of the identification, leaving less room to consider the wider symbolic possibilities of the rope: its suggestion of binding, of communal ties among the drinkers, perhaps even of entanglement or the sake’s own seductive and addictive pull.
The simile guides perception, allowing the visual resemblance to register immediately. At the same time, it keeps the two elements distinct: the sake is not literally a rope, but is seen as one. The poem does not collapse into identity, and in doing so, it preserves the interval between the images and allows that interval to remain active. Simile acts as a buffer, preventing immediate identification. It becomes a way of pacing ma, that does not eliminate metaphorical resonance but delays it.
3. The Cat’s Bell
A related but different effect can be found in a haiku by Kobayashi Issa:
つりがねのやうな声して猫の恋
tsurigane no yōna koe shite neko no koiwith a voice
like a temple bell…
the lover catTrans: David G. Lanoue
Here yōna functions as the simile marker. It serves a similar role to no gotoku, but is more colloquial and conversational in register, which suits Issa’s voice perfectly. Rather than reaching for an elevated or literary formulation, he uses the language of ordinary speech. This supports the sense of artlessness that is central to his poems: the comparison emerges naturally, almost casually, even when the image itself is quietly extraordinary.
At first glance, the comparison between the cry of a cat in heat and a temple bell may seem comic or exaggerated, but it is also acoustically exact. A cat’s yowl rises, sustains itself, and slowly fades. It has an eerie, resonant quality, something larger than the small animal producing it. A temple bell does something very similar: it is struck, reverberates outward, swells, and gradually dissolves into silence. The comparison is therefore not arbitrary; it rewards close listening.
There is also a potent tonal contrast beneath the surface. The temple bell is one of the most solemn sounds in Japanese culture. It marks time, calls people to prayer, sounds at funerals, and rings at the new year. The cry of the cat, by contrast, is bodily, nocturnal, and undignified. Issa holds these two registers together through the simile, and neither cancels the other out. Though there is humour, the bell is not mocked, nor is the cat reduced to a joke. If anything, the simile lends the animal’s desire a kind of plaintive dignity, beneath the crude reality something sacred in the call for reproduction and the perpetuation of life. The recurrence, the cyclicity of the phenomenon, takes on a ritual quality.
This haiku illustrates a further principle: simile does not merely preserve distance between two images—it stages and maximizes the contrast between them. When two things collapse into one another through metaphor or juxtaposition, their different registers tend to merge, and one usually dominates. The solemn absorbs the comic, or the comic undermines the solemn. The tension that gave the comparison its charge is resolved too quickly, and the poem settles into a single tone. Humour often depends on distance and paradoxically juxtaposition can sometimes flatten that distance. Here a bare juxtaposition would push the poem too far toward caricature.
the lover cat’s voice —
a temple bell
Simile resists this resolution, allowing the tenderness and precision of the poem to remain intact. By holding the two elements apart, it keeps both registers simultaneously active in the reader’s mind, serving as a form of tonal buffer. The bell remains a bell and the cat remains a cat, and the poem lives in the interval between them. Neither cancels the other out. The contrast is not resolved but sustained, and it is precisely this sustained tension that gives the poem its particular quality—at once funny and tender, undignified and strangely moving.
This is related but distinct from the distance-preserving function observed in the Kyoshi haiku. There, distance served perception: it allowed the visual resemblance to register clearly without hardening into identity. Here, distance serves feeling: it allows two emotional registers to coexist without collapsing into one. The mechanism is the same, but the effect is different. This suggests that simile’s capacity for preservation of distance is not a single trick but a principle with multiple consequences.
4. The Halfway Point
And this principle has yet another application in our next haiku again by Takahama Kyoshi:
yama no yuki kofun wo tatakitsukeshi goto
snow on the mountains
looking like women’s powder
hurriedly put on
To understand what Kyoshi is doing in this haiku in its entirety one must be aware of a set of classical kigo:
Spring — 山笑う yama warau — mountains laugh
Summer — 山滴る yama shitataru — mountains drip
Autumn — 山粧う yama yosou — mountains put on make-up
Winter — 山眠る yama nemuru — mountains sleep
Kyoshi, who cared about kigo more than almost any other modern haiku poet and fought for their preservation, could not have been unaware of these classical expressions, famous for their personification and anthropomorphism.
What makes Kyoshi’s poem so charged is that the autumn kigo yama yosou haunts the poem. He takes the autumn kigo — the careful, deliberate cosmetic adornment of yama yosou — and replaces it with its winter inversion. So the seasonal tension operates on multiple levels simultaneously: snow as winter kigo, the cosmetic metaphor invoking the autumn kigo it is displacing, and the transitional moment between the two — early winter arriving before autumn has fully released its hold.
The poem shows transition as a kind of indignity — or at least as a loss of composure. Autumn is the mountain at its most self-possessed, at her most deliberate and beautiful — the maple reds and golds her rouge and brocade, applied with patience and artistry. The first snow catches it unprepared, partially covered, still showing the dark slopes beneath. Tataku means to strike, pat, slap. It is not the careful application of powder with a brush but the quick pressing motion — tataki, repeatedly striking. There is almost violence in it, or at least urgency. The snow did not settle gently; it was thrown on. This captures something true about early winter weather — a sudden cold snap, an unexpected overnight snowfall, the mountain surprised into whiteness before it was ready. Autumn has been interrupted rather than concluded. The mountain has not had time to become fully winter, just as the woman has not had time to properly dress. It is suspended between states, slightly dishevelled, and there is in that suspension something both funny and touching — the great world caught in an unfinished moment, between one season and the next, like all of us.
Kyoshi is actively stepping back from yama yosou, refusing to let the mountain become the woman. The simile, marked by goto, is a deliberate withholding. It honours the saijiki tradition by invoking it, and subverts it by refusing to simply inhabit it. It is the tool that allows Kyoshi both to invoke yama yosou and to step back from it, gently and precisely undercutting the personification it evokes. Juxtaposition would have bypassed the kigo entirely. Straight anthropomorphism/personification would have confirmed it. In Kyoshi’s hands, simile becomes the exact instrument the poem needs.
In this poem, simile acts as a buffer to avoid full anthropomorphism/personification and there is also something appropriate in that for the subject matter. The whole poem is about incompleteness — snow not yet fully settled, autumn not yet fully gone, a woman not yet properly dressed. The simile itself enacts that incompleteness. Even the figurative language refuses to fully arrive. The mountain stays a mountain. The poet stays a poet. The like is the exact distance between them. Which is very Kyoshi — kyakkan shasei operating even at the level of the figure of speech.
Conclusion:
To conclude this introduction to the topic, let us address Gurga’s injunction — “If a thing is like something else, then best to talk about that other thing in the first place” — which seems to echo Bashō’s famous maxim: “learn of the pine tree from the pine tree.” Bashō indeed emphasizes direct observation and fidelity to the object itself, yet is simile truly in conflict with this principle? Consider Bashō’s haiku:
matsutake ya kabureta hodo wa matsu no nari
pine mushroom
with its ragged top it’s
like a pine treeTrans: Jane Reichold
Here, Bashō deliberately employs an explicit comparison to connect the mushroom to the pine tree above it. This is a careful mediation between faithful observation and perceptual insight. The resemblance between the mushroom and the pine is subtle, not immediately obvious, and without the explicit comparison marker hodo, most readers would likely miss it. The simile guides perception, revealing a hidden relational truth: these two organisms, sharing the same environment, mirror each other visually. Here the simile is not decorative; it performs philosophical work. It signals the interconnectedness of things—the mushroom and the pine tree do not merely coexist; they echo each other in form, their natures intertwined for better or worse. The likeness is not superficial; it expresses a relational principle in nature. As their roots intermingle underground, their forms above ground resonate: simile is not merely helping the reader “see” the mushroom; it is the meaning of the haiku. And in no way does this betray Bashō’s aesthetic principles—it exemplifies them, demonstrating that explicit comparison can illuminate relational depth while remaining faithful to the observed world.
That Bashō used simile makes it difficult to argue that it has no place in haiku, and he did not use it just once. But this is, of course, an easy argument to make, and potentially a fallacious one: the fact that a master used a technique does not by itself establish that the technique is good, necessary, or appropriate to the form. What Bashō’s example does establish is something more modest but more important: simile cannot simply be dismissed as inherently incompatible with haiku. The question, then, is not merely whether simile is permitted, but what it can do.
This poem is not an isolated example. Through the following weeks, we will read more haiku featuring simile by Bashō, Kobayashi Issa, Buson, Masaoka Shiki, Takahama Kyoshi, Awano Seiho, Nakamura Kusatao, and other Japanese haiku poets. The close readings will show that simile has unique, varied, and powerful uses in haiku, and that the haiku tradition developed particular strategies to maximize its effect. They will show that the tension between the device’s directness and the form’s indirection is at times unavoidable, but can also be something poetically productive, and actively sought.
Haiku never asks what is permitted; it only ever asks what is necessary. Simile is not foreign to haiku but one of the many ways haiku teaches us that things are never only themselves.
— Orense Nicod
This exploration of simile will be an extensive deep dive, so rather than running its parts consecutively, we’ll be interspersing them with other topics along the way.
Next week, Adam Graham will be Moon and Finger’s first guest editor, with an essay exploring why what shasei looks like today cannot be the same as it was when Shiki formulated it.
CALL FOR PROPOSALS:
For the final instalment of our series on simile, I would like to turn to English-language haiku, after looking at examples from Bashō, Issa, Buson, Shiki, Kyoshi and many other Japanese poets. To help answer the question what does simile look like in haiku written in English today?, I would like to gather a wider range of examples—not only poems that support the arguments we have made, but interesting uses of simile of any kind.
If you have an example of a haiku using simile, preferably one published by yourself or another poet, please send it to us using the proposals form and include the poet’s name and where the haiku was published.
We are particularly interested in examples that make us reconsider what simile can do in haiku.
We look forward to seeing what you find.
At the end of each post you will find a short anonymous poll related to the topic of the week (3 or 5 questions).
It asks not what you know about haiku but what you experience reading and writing it — whether an argument lands, whether a poem does what the essay claims it does, whether your practice matches the orthodoxies you’ve been taught. There are no correct answers. A no or a not yet is as valuable as a yes, and more valuable than a performance of agreement.
Periodic issues titled Chorus will return to what the polls have gathered — not to tally verdicts but to examine what the pattern of responses reveals. Where readers converge is interesting. Where they diverge is often more so. The more poets who participate the richer the picture.
Discussion is welcomed in the Comments thread at the very end of this post. Meanwhile, if you would like to propose a topic you wish to see addressed, or better still, if you have an outline proposal for an article that you would be prepared to write—if accepted—please submit it to us via the submission form immediately below this text:
Why Moon and Finger? Zen, Chan, and Indian Buddhist texts cite the metaphor of a Finger pointing at the Moon with a caution: do not mistake the finger for the moon itself. Clinging to words or doctrines (the finger) obscures the awakened mind or truth (the moon). Thus, the analyses, views, and critiques of haiku in this feature are but the Finger. Haiku is the Moon itself, to be viewed by all. Views expressed here are those of the individual authors alone, except where otherwise attributed. They are very much open to discussion in the comments thread below. We all learn.
Introducing the hosts:
Orense Nicod is a French poet working across forms, with a particular focus on haiku. Born in Paris, she spent ten years of her childhood in South Africa before returning to France and writes in both French and English.
Her work has appeared in journals including Frogpond, Cattails, and The Asahi Haikuist Network. She has twice won first prize in the Haiku Society of America Rengay Awards, in collaboration with Joan Fingon (2021) and Anton R-kelian (2025).
A former teacher, she is raising her two children and her poetic expectations while co-hosting Moon and Finger with Keith Evetts on The Haiku Foundation.
Keith Evetts lives in Thames Ditton, Surrey. Life Fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. Aside from scientific papers, diplomatic telegrams, and local history articles, he’s written poetry of various kinds for sixty years, much of it sub rosa. Latterly host and managing editor of the Foundation’s re:Virals commentary feature since December 2021, one of the ten editors of the annual Red Moon Anthology, and an administrator of Facebook’s largest haiku group. Married with five children, cottage garden, grey parrot, and a sense of humour. His short bio is here.
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🆕Orense, as you are collecting, here are a few of my own that border on, or use, a version of simile, and one with a straight stated metaphor:
scratching his crotch
like any other
President
Poetry Pea Journal 2:22 September 2022
frogs…
I can still sing
like them
Five Fleas Itchy Poetry 5 April 2023
grey dawn
a woodpigeon tells it
like it is
Failed Haiku issue 96, December 2023
getting older
prone to drop things
like birthdays
Cold Moon Journal June 2024
distant lightning
what it was like
to be fourteen
Frogpond 45.2 — Spring-Summer 2022
ant
this world
is a sundew world
The Haiku Foundation Haiku Dialogue 15 June 2022
the springlike smile
in a young woman’s eyes
as she passes
different playlists
in our earbuds
Blithe Spirit 35:2 May 2025
(actually, I’m now wondering whether straighforward similes might be found more frequently in tanka, or not, given the different characteristics of tanka / waka. But that would be a different story, of only marginal relevance to us here).
Again, as with Alan, just doing a text search for ‘like’ but I have probably used several other forms of simile without the dreary ‘like.’ In several of these, now I come to look at them again, the simile is not stated but left open (“like ‘it’ is”, “things like”, “what ‘to be fourteen’ was like”). So they probably don’t count.
If I’d used: ant / this world / is a sundew
I’d have lost the echo of Issa.
.
🆕️Fun examples! I cannot pick a favourite, they feel equally appreciated by me.
SIMILE or not, scratching our crotch used to be very Michael Jackson (singer) and later Miley Cyrus (goddaughter of Dolly Parton) and now we just assume the comparison, so it must be a simile after all, is that we are debased as certain ahem, ‘leaders’!
scratching his crotch
like any other
President
*
Oddly it’s making me rather fond of ‘like except for Presidents!
I see that I’ve used ‘like’ in prose though not so much in my haiku. I feel a little guilty that I’ve not ‘liked’ ‘like’ enough now!
___________________________
PROSE EXTRACTS for LIKES:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Sometimes you kiss me like a knife.
Alan Summers
PUBLICATION CREDIT:
The Moon is in my Torch
PRINT: Rattle Spring 2025 issue Tribute to the Haibun issue #87 March 1, 2025
AUDIO: June 2025 https://rattle.com/the-moon-is-in-my-torch-by-alan-summers/
*
ut terrebis
ut terrebis
ut terrebis
It’s like a Vietnam War gameshow segue segue segue Persian Gulf Middle East Ukraine Damascus Other Holy Places
Alan Summers:
The Brief case Encounter
Pan Haiku Review issue four – haibun & tanka-bun edition (Winter 2024)
(PHR4)
*
and each version of my mother marks me like a ring in a bath
that won’t quite scrub away.
Alan Summers
haibun: Are you Mother-of-pearl?
Contemporary Haibun Online December 2024 ed. Terri French
*
HAIKU:
.
Aoko mora we eat our livers as stilettos
Alan Summers
First publication credit:
HAIKU DIALOGUE – Ekphrasti-ku… Misguided Little Unforgivable Hierarchies
Guest Editor Pippa Phillips (January 2022)
Feature/Interview:
Tete-a-Tete: Alan Summers, Wise Owl literary journal (April 2022)
.
“If Finnegan’s Wake were a haiku, it would look something like this”
Pippa Phillips
_________________
Pippa continues:
–––––––––––––––––
“…‘Ao,’ in Japanese, can mean either blue or green – the blue aspect plays on the next word, while the green aspect conjures up budding vegetation – another meaning it has is algae bloom. It can be a girl’s name in Japan as well as Africa – for the Luo, a Kenyan-Tanzanian tribe, it means ‘born outside.’ While ‘mora’ continues the multicultural picture of youth and nature, haikuists might have come across this word being used interchangeably with ‘on,’ the basic sound unit of Japanese – although mora is a more general linguistic term. This adds a metatextual dimension to the poem, asking us to measure its sound. ‘Stiletto’ is also ambiguous – it can also be a knife. That and the eating of livers conjures up mythic punishments – Prometheus’s eagle, the pain of the little mermaid’s bargain – but the poem implies we punish ourselves – and the stiletto is, after all, a punishing shoe to wear.”
*
I’m now wondering that I might love not just like similes and they are unintentionally hidden, not out of conscious design, I’ve just side-stepped the obvious and at one time ubiquitous use of ‘like’ ‘as’ and the other comparative words that Keith kindly donated to this feature! (smiles)
e.g.
*
each window its own night train
Alan Summers
Honourable mention, British Haiku Society Awards 2018/19 (Haiku Section)
judge: Scott Mason
*
each window IS its own night train
each window AS its own night train
each window LIKE its own night train
*
I guess it just seemed more powerful and direct, and less ‘poetic’ to go straight to the matter rather than use the intermediary of a simile?
Perhaps we are all building a case that is either pro-simile or considered, and that it holds its power alongside the MIGHTY METAPHOR!
Alan
🆕️All wonderful examples, but I think most of these aren’t actually similes. This is a useful reminder that the presence of like in itself doesn’t make something a simile.
Like can also mark exemplification, as in your “getting older” haiku:
prone to drop things
like birthdays
The test is to replace like with such as:
prone to drop things
such as birthdays
The meaning is essentially the same: birthdays are being given as an example of the things one can “drop.” What may give the poem an impression of being figurative is the zeugma: “drop” is being applied to things and birthdays in different ways, that makes us momentarily look for a figurative connection. But the construction itself is neither figurative nor a simile; like is functioning exemplificationally.
I think the distant thunder haiku counts as simile. The paraphrase shows why: the memory of being 14 is like distant thunder or being 14 is like lightning.
This is actually another useful reminder for the series: we need to distinguish the surface marker from the poetic operation it is performing. And also look into other simile markers: as, as if, as though etc
🆕️Great response re:
getting older
prone to drop things
like birthdays
Cold Moon Journal June 2024
distant lightning
what it was like
to be fourteen
Frogpond 45.2 — Spring-Summer 2022
*
Clearly works if mentally we read:
distant lightning
like being
to be fourteen
Is this a hidden simile or another device as as axiom, adage etc…?
getting older
like birthdays
A good test is removing a good part of the haiku/senryū and as you did, substitute ‘like’ for various other words:
getting older
such as birthdays
getting older
apart from birthdays
etc…
So if we change our direction as poets and seek simile deliberately instead of avoiding them, we need to be both careful it’s a simile and counter-wise create something just as strong or stronger!
Just a thought.
Alan
🆕️I think that really, only the frogs one is a simile inasmuch as it refers to the way they sing, by implication.
If we’re going to stick to a tight definition of ‘simile’ then ambivalent examples, that is, the blurred margins, will tend to be excluded.
Just a reminder to take the poll!😀
I began writing haiku in May 2021. My first scifaiku was accepted by Scifaikuest in June 2021. My first traditional haiku was accepted by Wales Haiku Journal in July 2021. Since then, my best records indicate that I have written 4,888 (plus twenty or thirty drafts in my note.) Of these, 2,885 have been published, 1,435 are unpublished (I am about to finish a Buson 100; the first I have done: which has inflated my count), and 568 are retired/trashed drafts etc. In that time, I have written exactly 2 haiku using similes.
I guess I consider myself a rule breaker—so I am a little embarrassed. I absolutely internalize “no similes” very very early on—and never unlearned it.
Joshua, I think you’ve actually demonstrated the point of the essay beautifully—and there’s absolutely no reason to be embarrassed! 😄 If anything, the fact that you consider yourself a rule breaker while having written nearly 5,000 haiku and only two with similes is a pretty striking illustration of how deeply “no similes” can become internalised.
What interests me is that you didn’t consciously decide, thousands of times over, that a simile was inappropriate. The prohibition simply became part of the background against which you wrote. That’s precisely the kind of inherited convention I’m interested in examining: once a prescription becomes sufficiently familiar, we can experience it not as a rule imposed from outside but as an intuition about what a haiku is.
And I suspect that’s why revisiting the question is useful even for writers who have no particular interest in “breaking rules.” The question isn’t whether similes should replace other techniques, but whether we have been taught to reject a perfectly ordinary poetic operation before asking what it might actually do in haiku.
Also, now I’m curious about those two! 😂
🆕️Joshua, Orense,
I’m curious too, re those two similes.
In breaking rules aren’t we following them, in a different “interpretive” manner?
In fact most laws are not as binary as we might believe.
The Buson 100 is a brilliant undertaking, one of Call of the Page poets presently is committed to this as their partner is in dire health with botched operations etc… It’s the only thing that helps, as trying to craft haiku one by one is not really possible for them. It’s brought out a new companion voice in their work with very little revision in some instances.
Entering poetry before any awareness of haiku, I guess the ultimate goal was the perfect metaphor, and never simile as a prize, just as a device. Early immersion with haiku via available resources and some dodgy online haiku feedback possibly damaged both my confidence and self-belief, as well as my ability to regularly write haiku or without one leader and their domino effect dissing my work as a haiku verse.
Now with all the severe contradictions being absorbed and set aside, I feel I’m not so much breaking or damaging any precious and perceived rules (Japan does things so differently and brilliantly, hence my checking Fay Aoyagi’s blog on a daily basis) but ENGAGING with them.
Alan
🆕️Also there is another factor that I think compounds the effect: there are structural reasons why the opportunity for simile is simply rarer in haiku. The form itself tends to favour certain kinds of relation and certain kinds of compression, and those can make explicit comparison less frequent. We’ll see some of those structural constraints and affordances as the series develops.
So I think we have two things reinforcing each other: a critical tradition that has tended to discourage or undervalue simile, and a form whose own structures constrain the opportunities for simile. But, as the examples will show, that still doesn’t make simile foreign to haiku.
Britannica:
“metaphor, figure of speech that implies comparison between two unlike entities, as distinguished from simile, an explicit comparison signalled by the words like or as.
The distinction is not simple. A metaphor makes a qualitative leap from a reasonable, perhaps prosaic, comparison to an identification or fusion of two objects, the intention being to create one new entity that partakes of the characteristics of both. Many critics regard the making of metaphors as a system of thought antedating or bypassing logic.”
—-
It’s becoming evident that a bald distinction of metaphor, as a transfer or fusion of meaning, from a simile as a comparison, is far too rigid and binary to scope the nuances between similarity and identification in our flexible language.
Indeed in haiku, where we frequently see two images “internally compared” across a cut or separator, we tend to see that in terms of “metaphor.” But the reader is left to make a comparison, to discover the similarities between them: the “link.” So one could think instead that there is occasion to regard it as a simile.
Taking Archie Carlos’
the garden snail
on our driveway
Ukraine talks
The reader is clearly invited to consider what are the similarities between these two things (snail, on driveway) and the third, the talks, and how they might apply to (or code for) the huge superpowers’ behind-the-scenes dealings to “fix Ukraine” to their own convenience, with little concern for who or what might be crushed in this slow process. Similarities = simile. Rather than taking every aspect of a garden snail, for instance its hermaphrodite gender orientation, to represent the state and complexity of Ukraine talks. So is the missing part, removed by the cut, the garden snail on our driveway ‘IS’ the Ukraine talks, or is it ‘IS TO A CONSIDERABLE EXTENT LIKE’ those talks?
There are many gradations. We’ve glimpsed hodo as “to some extent…” (…taking on the shape of a pine). There are dozens of ways to embody simile and/or metaphor in English. A broad rainbow where there are no lines to separate the graded colours. Had I the time, I could write a whole post. We would have to include metonymy. And (another word to relish, hey) hypocatastasis.
Yet again I wonder whether labelled pigeonholes are of much importance to the pigeons, or merely to academics.
METAPHOR/SIMILE/THEORY
@Adam Graham @Keith Evetts
Let’s buckle up, because we are now venturing into metaphor theory. 😊 I was preparing to answer Adam on his conception of metaphor and simile, and I think I will merge my responses since they ultimately address the same question.
There is a reason the debate about the nature of metaphor and its relationship to simile has persisted to this day. As you remark, there are many ambiguous cases, and the question of whether metaphor is fundamentally a comparison or a categorisation remains a live debate. But complexity does not mean that we should stop asking the question. How we answer it has important consequences for how we understand figurative language more generally.
I have developed my own understanding of the relationship between metaphor and simile, which has helped clarify the issue for me.
First, Adam’s distinction between metaphor’s centripetal force and simile’s centrifugal force is very suggestive. It actually aligns quite well with my own intuition, although I would frame the difference slightly differently: in terms of the direction of the perceptual operation.
Comparison and categorisation are not separate processes; they are mutually generative. We compare things because we perceive some basis of relation, but comparison itself can also produce new categories through which we perceive the world. In that sense, simile and metaphor can be understood as different directions along the same cognitive pathway.
Simile begins with comparison. It places two things in relation while preserving the interval between them. The movement is back and forth: we move between A and B, noticing where they align and where they diverge. From that oscillation, a felt categorisation may emerge — a sense that these things belong together under some newly perceived relation. But that categorisation arises from the comparison; it is not the starting point.
Metaphor moves in the opposite direction. It begins with a recategorisation: A is apprehended through the frame of B. We bring the two things into contact and explore the fit between them — where they align, where they resist, and what becomes visible through that new framing. The comparison emerges from the categorisation as a byproduct, as the “felt shape” of the fit.
This also helps explain the ambiguous limit cases between simile and metaphor. If they are understood as processes rather than fixed categories, we should expect them to meet and interact at certain points. A simile can generate such a powerful new categorisation that it begins to feel metaphorical; a metaphor can retain enough awareness of the relation between its terms that the comparative movement remains active within it.
But the fact that they can meet does not mean that the distinction disappears. They remain different directions of movement: one begins from comparison and moves toward categorisation; the other begins from categorisation and moves toward comparison.
From this distinction, further consequences follow, which we will pursue throughout the series. Simile tends to compare fragments or aspects; metaphor tends toward wholes or categories. Simile is primarily perceptual: it asks us to notice a correspondence between things. Metaphor is more ontological: it asks us to apprehend one thing through the being or category of another.
Simile is often provisional, opening a possibility of relation; metaphor tends toward the universalising or generalising, offering a frame through which something can be understood. But these are tendencies rather than fixed boundaries. The very processes that distinguish them also allow them to meet and transform into one another.
My intention is not to lean too much into the theoretical aspect of things throughout the series (I know that doesn’t sound like me 😂) but to work on the distinct characteristics of simile and how they can be exploited poetically. But I also suspect that theory will naturally emerge from the exploration because figurative language is not just an interesting literary trick; it reveals something about how perception itself works. And we cannot help but want to understand what is, after all, a fundamental process of meaning-making.
Good response if I may say so.
“…we should expect them to meet and interact at certain points….They remain different directions of movement: one begins from comparison and moves toward categorisation; the other begins from categorisation and moves toward comparison.”
Agree.
“And we cannot help but want to understand what is, after all, a fundamental process of meaning-making.”
True. I am the same. But while (agreed) definitions are of importance if orderly discussion is to proceed, I am wary of too many of them in a taxonomic approach. All the more so when we see that they are not discrete things but part of a process, a spectrum, a continuum. Granted that taxonomy provided essential data for Darwin to puzzle out and challenge, but the resulting conception of the process and (paralleled by Alfred Russel Wallace) the mechanism of evolution…now, there’s the thing.
Yes, I think we are very much on the same page here. I’m wary of a taxonomic approach too, especially when the things we are trying to distinguish are better understood as movements within a larger process.
That said, I think taxonomy is actually essential here. Part of what has muddied the exploration of simile, in my view, is precisely that the taxonomic distinction between simile and metaphor was collapsed into the idea of simile as merely “diet metaphor”—a weaker or diluted version of the same thing.
Once the distinction between the two disappears, it becomes very difficult to ask what simile actually does differently. Every comparison can simply be treated as a matter of degree: more or less metaphorical, more or less fused, more or less strong. The specific characteristics of simile then disappear from view.
I’m trying to recover a distinction that has been blurred, and then use that distinction to investigate the processes that connect the two. The fact that they can overlap, interact, and exist along a continuum doesn’t make the distinction meaningless. Quite the opposite: we need to know what distinguishes the poles before we can properly explore what happens between them.
In other words, I think we need the taxonomy in order to get beyond the taxonomy. 😊 And I think that’s where your Darwin analogy is particularly apt. Taxonomy gives us the distinctions through which we can begin to see a pattern, but the interesting question is what those distinctions reveal about the underlying process. That is much closer to what I’m trying to do here.
Righto. Here’s some taxonomy! Try out on similes or metaphors alike (hah! see what I did there?)
Test phrase:
the estate agent is ……(like) a shark
the estate agent is ……a shark
Partial comparison: two things share some traits, but aren’t identical:
in some ways
akin to
reminiscent of
sort of, kind of
in a sense
suggests (see Alan’s “distant foghorn / the shark suggests / a good dentist”
Approximates:
approximates
close to
almost
not quite
practically
Partial metaphor/simile
to some extent
in a manner of speaking
so to speak
as it were
metaphorically speaking
somewhat
Modifiers
quasi-
-ish (as in ‘owlish’)
-wise (as in ‘crabwise’)
-like (as in sportsmanlike, catlike)
Near-identity (the “almost” category) further finegrained:
almost a
bordering on
all but a
verging on
The negative or deficit comparison (the “not quite” category) further finegrained
not quite
short of
a failed
a shadow of
less than
The superfluity comparison:
more than
greater than
exceeds
Fleeting, unstable or conditional comparisons
for a moment
as good as
passes for
masked as
Hypocatastasis
An implied comparison that is even more direct than a metaphor:
“You snake!” Or “Beast!” (role of speech again)
Similitude
An older literary term for a likeness—shared internal qualities or resonance rather than a simple resemblance.
Transformational shift (introduces movement and time)
becoming
turning into
dissolving into
bleeding into
hardening into
Illusion
mistaken for
posing as
masquerading as
the ghost of
an echo of
Latent comparison
a nascent
pregnant with
an embryonic
a seedling of
the germ of
Hypothesis comparison “as if” (or conditional comparison) an alternative reality where the metaphor (or simile) is suspended in the imagination.
as though it were
might be called
if not a… then
Metonymic aura for want of a plainer phrase! (“he had the look of the gallows”)
Embedded metaphor (“The oyster smack ghosted up the creek to its mooring”) (“Ah, komorebi! The laced light under the leaves”
Compound synthesis (“Her birdlike bones, his fish-mouth gasping”)
Etymological invocation (“A ghastly mistake”)
That should keep you going till Christmas!
…
Other qualified comparisons, unsorted;
to all intents and purposes
in some important respects
in some ways
in essence
roughly
for all the world
more or less
You monster! 🤣🤣🤣
🆕️Who, me? 😇
I am not infrequently thus hypocastasised by my everlovin’
Thanks Keith, the shark is a fascinating literary device as well as used off and on in a regular basis amongst the normal populace, and on Wall Street etc… whether bullish or sharkish:
Sage Kakkat — CEO, global macro strategist, and creator of The Shark of Wall Street™
etc…
Why Almost Everyone Loses—Except a Few Sharks…
https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/polymarket-kalshi-betting-profits-prediction-markets-eb23ac11
_________
re literary:
–––––––––
extract from:
The Thoughtful Raven
after Ted Hughes, and Kurt Jackson
The requiem bird is a shark of the wind.
Alan Summers
First Publication Credit:
haibun,
Blithe Spirit 26.4 winter issue 2016
Anthology Credit:
The New English Verse: An International Anthology of Poetry
ed. Suzie Palmer (Cyberwit 2017)
collection: by ink of crow pub. Call of the Page (November 2025)
.
The requiem bird is a shark of the wind.
It feels like both a metaphor and a simile as mind places it like this:
The requiem bird is LIKE a shark of the wind.
*
And other than the DC Comics character, a shark in cartoons and in real life are known for a great set of teeth!
distant foghorn
the shark suggests
a good dentist
Alan Summers
Publication credit:
Grandmother’s Pearls: An Anthology of Dream Poems
ed. Alexis Rotella d(Jade Mountain Press, 2021)
page 86
.
My other shark works might have bite though not as similes or metaphors!
Alan: ah, yes. I’ve added ‘suggests’ and your shark example to the taxonomy!
…and in the ‘requiem bird..’ if you replace the “is” with a cut, say a comma, we have parataxis (which I use quite a bit in prose), and there is deliberate ambiguity between simile and metaphor. The reader has options to hold in the mind, and it is less blunt than stating “is” or “like”.
The requiem bird, a shark of the wind.
Is it a simile, is it a metaphor, is it two coincidental observations that resonate with each other on some plane that is neither. It’s nice. All the more so because the French for shark is requin.
🆕️Alan, I think “the requiem bird is a shark of the wind” is even more interesting than simply saying that it feels like both a metaphor and a simile. I wonder if you are almost proposing a new kenning here: “shark of the wind” as a poetic designation for the requiem bird.
That seems to me to sit very interestingly at the intersection of metaphor and metonymy. Rather than simply saying that the bird is like a shark, you give it a new poetic designation by selecting a particular network of relations between the two. And “of the wind” makes it feel almost like a newly coined compound designation—something like a wind-shark.
And we can do this with kennings more generally. Take the famous “whale-road” for the sea. We can unpack the kenning comparatively:
the sea is like a road for whales
But the kenning itself isn’t a simile. It gives the sea a new poetic designation through a metonymic relation, while the designation is constructed through a metaphorical frame. The comparison is something we recover when we unpack that designation.
I think something similar is happening with “shark of the wind.” We can unpack the designation and discover the comparison that makes it intelligible, but that doesn’t mean the original expression is functioning as a simile. Rather, the metaphorical/kenning-like designation generates a comparative reading in the process of being unpacked.
I hadn’t thought of it quite this way before, but this may actually be another nice example of how one figurative operation can generate another in the reader. The compressed metaphorical designation can unfold into comparison, just as comparison can sometimes consolidate back into a new designation.
.
🆕️Hi Orense, Keith,
The Thoughtful Raven was a deep dive into research, as is not uncommon with other types of poetry. Though I didn’t book into the British Library as others might do!
I can see looking at the ‘poem’ there is a nod to the Kenning whale-road (“hron-rād”), which I might have taken note of in my ‘fugue’ and therefore not consciously picked it. Fugue can be very magpie!
I’ve looked at my haibun, which was a series of experiments as former Blithe Spirit editor Dave Serjeant championed my haibun and insisted on them appearing in each issue! I was surprised that “Strange Bed” (2017) was accepted! Inspired by David Cobley’s Strange Bed. I subverted lots of dictionary definitions which I see people have started doing recently too! It was either an extended simile or metaphor perhaps?
Back to The Thoughtful Raven, I’ve looked at it again as a poem without haiku, which it might have started out as, and I’m still glad I added haiku.
One of the poems studied at Junior School (8-12) was The Thought Fox, so very different from all the other poetry studied, and controversially by a poet still living!
_____________
ORENSE said
–––––––––––––
“Alan, I think “the requiem bird is a shark of the wind” is even more interesting than simply saying that it feels like both a metaphor and a simile. I wonder if you are almost proposing a new kenning here: “shark of the wind” as a poetic designation for the requiem bird.”
Quite possibly, although it’s not a compound noun?
I see the word did not exist in Beowulf’s time and is almost a modern(ish) word first used for swindlers and not marine mammals. The etymology is fascinating and a bit of a rabbit hole, perhaps why I have rabbit dusk in the last haiku!
_____________
ORENSE said
–––––––––––––
“That seems to me to sit very interestingly at the intersection of metaphor and metonymy. Rather than simply saying that the bird is like a shark, you give it a new poetic designation by selecting a particular network of relations between the two. And “of the wind” makes it feel almost like a newly coined compound designation—something like a wind-shark.”
Yes, it’s definitely a wind-shark. Studying about sharks and oddly enough the revealing “SHARK! Celebrity Infested Waters” series, it seems only humans, and maybe Polar bears, are the only two consistently active predators and not always for food.
_____________
ORENSE said
–––––––––––––
And we can do this with kennings more generally. Take the famous “whale-road” for the sea. We can unpack the kenning comparatively:
the sea is like a road for whales
But the kenning itself isn’t a simile. It gives the sea a new poetic designation through a metonymic relation, while the designation is constructed through a metaphorical frame. The comparison is something we recover when we unpack that designation.
__________
Alan says
––––––––––
Yes, and a poetic breakdown and deconstruction. Perhaps most poetry is that, deconstructing ‘life’ and its many denizens, trying to make sense rather than bomb? We are not the bombers nor wish to be the bombees or on the sidelines. I guess that’s why poetry is so often viewed with suspicion, as a threat.
_____________
ORENSE said
–––––––––––––
“I think something similar is happening with “shark of the wind.” We can unpack the designation and discover the comparison that makes it intelligible, but that doesn’t mean the original expression is functioning as a simile. Rather, the metaphorical/kenning-like designation generates a comparative reading in the process of being unpacked.”
___________
ALAN says
–––––––––––
I’m starting to see that simile and metaphor are merely starter packs. Often poets outside haikai literature are looking for a new, fresh, iconic, metaphor, and to be lauded for it, perhaps. Just as kigo are designed to be used over and over again by many poets and be instantly recognised on many levels all at once, the perfect metaphor (and even simile) are perhaps too, the shark of the poem.
_____________
ORENSE said
–––––––––––––
“I hadn’t thought of it quite this way before, but this may actually be another nice example of how one figurative operation can generate another in the reader. The compressed metaphorical designation can unfold into comparison, just as comparison can sometimes consolidate back into a new designation.”
YES! A dialogue that reaches beyond just the superficial intellect, and wants connection. Something that politics will never allow. It’s always sidestepping dialogue, with few exceptions.
I would agree to the core of what Orense wrote, “Simile is primarily perceptual: it asks us to notice a correspondence between things. Metaphor is more ontological: it asks us to apprehend one thing through the being or category of another.”
I think an aspect of the ontological base of Metaphor is that it generates new (conceptually) ontological objects in its operation, and thus the world/reality/etc is different post-metaphor.
*
In general I’m wondering if the actions under discussion is less a Simile vs. Metaphor, and more Speech-Transparency vs. Speech-Opaqueness.
Stated-metaphors, while still being metaphors, operate similarly to how traditional Simile operates, ie. “perceptually” rather than “ontologically.”
The stated-metaphor, “My heart is a fire burning for you,” is a metaphor, but because it’s Speech-Opaque it seems to loose the ontological base of unstated-metaphors (i.e. “my heart burns of you”) and IS acting as traditional Similes act (?)
🆕️Adam: how would you assess the variant:
“my heart afire for you”
where we are not using the noun ‘fire’ as an entity for a metaphor, but borrowing one of its properties? (Is pyromorphism on the list of undesirables in haiku, I wonder in passing?…)
(And the imp in me adds a version in contemporary speech:
“Like my heart’s afire for you.” )
🆕️Adam, I think your example is very interesting for my purposes, and thinking about it has led me to another hypothesis. I’m not sure that opacity/transparency and markedness are actually the salient factors here.
For instance, “My heart is a haunted house” is a marked/stated metaphor, but it doesn’t read as simile-like to me at all. The identification is immediate and stable: the heart is being apprehended through the frame of the haunted house. So markedness clearly doesn’t determine the direction in which the figurative operation moves. I think markedness may be more important as a matter of reader experience, especially within the poetic frame, than as a determinant of the underlying operation.
I think there are actually two different things going on in your example. First, “My heart is a fire burning for you” is in effect a compound metaphor, a mini-conceit if you will. It has two parts, and arguably two different frames being applied: my heart is a fire and burning for you. That structure behaves differently from a simple metaphor such as “my heart is a fire.”
Conceits, running metaphors, and compound metaphors progressively unravel or unpack the metaphor’s comparative process. As the metaphor is elaborated, the initial categorical identification becomes increasingly partial: we have to follow particular correspondences rather than simply recognise A as B. In that sense, the elaborated metaphor can begin to behave more like simile.
But there is an interesting paradox here. In a successful conceit, once the comparative process has been fully unfolded, the fragments can suddenly snap back into place and produce an even more powerful identification than the original metaphor. The identification at the end has been earned through the comparative process.
I also wonder whether another factor is at play in your particular example: aspect. “My heart is a fire” presents the metaphor relatively statively, whereas “burning for you” introduces an ongoing process. So the sentence is stacking two modes that are somewhat in tension: a categorical/stative identification and a processual one. That may be part of what makes “my heart is a fire burning for you” feel slightly awkward, whereas “my heart is burning for you” feels much more natural.
But I think the important point is what that friction does to the metaphor. If metaphor depends on recognition—on the relatively fluent apprehension of A through the category or frame of B—then friction within the metaphorical construction tends to interfere with its primary operation. The aspectual tension in your example makes it harder simply to recognise the heart as fire. We are pushed instead toward attending to the relation between heart and fire, and to the particular way in which the burning corresponds to the feeling.
So perhaps an inapt or internally resistant metaphor tends to revert toward comparison. When categorical recognition becomes difficult to sustain, comparison provides another way of maintaining the relation: rather than simply recognising A as B, we begin attending to how A and B correspond. The metaphorical operation has not necessarily failed; it has begun to move in the opposite direction.
This might also explain why dynamic processes seem to me conceptually closer to simile’s domain. A category works through recognition, whereas a process has to be followed. The more a metaphor has to represent something unfolding, changing, or developing, the more it may have to break its initial categorical whole into particular relations.
So I’m increasingly inclined to keep markedness, figurative direction, and development as separate axes. Markedness affects the reader’s experience of the operation, especially within the poetic frame; it doesn’t determine the operation itself. Figurative direction concerns whether we move primarily from comparison toward categorisation or from categorisation toward comparison. Development concerns how far that operation is unfolded and particularised.
And that fits the broader model I proposed: simile and metaphor aren’t just opposing static forms. They are opposite directions in a recursive process. Comparison can generate categorisation; categorisation can generate comparison. An extended metaphor can move from categorisation through comparison and, at its culmination, return to categorisation with greater force. In a good conceit, the final identification can be more powerful precisely because the comparative movement has made us work our way toward it.
_________________________
re simile as simile in haiku
––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Regardless of what Classic, Modern, and Contemporary Japanese-language haikai poets wrote whether simile, metaphor etc…, it seems like many Western single-person authorities or multi-person authorities appeared to oppose this, and passed it on to other non-Japanese ‘authorities’…
___________________________________________________________________________________________
Here are some modern and contemporary (2005 onwards) Japanese-language haiku poets
and one useful WWII era new kigo that survived:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
藻のごとく眠り夢にもさみだるる
鍵和田秞子
mo no gotoku nemuri yume nimo samidaruru
Yuko Kagiwada (1932-2020)
Haiku Dai-Saijiki (Comprehensive Haiku Saijiki),
Kadokawa Shoten, Tokyo, 2006
sleeping like seaweed
I drift in spring disarray
within a dream
English version: Alan Summers
Spring Kigo: seaweed or laver (nori)
https://yths.org/season-word-list/#Spring
*
日と月のごとく二輪の寒牡丹
鷹羽狩行
hi to tsuki no gotoku nirin no kan-botan
looking like
a sun and a moon
two winter peonies
Shugyo Takaha (1930-2024)
Haiku Saijiki electronic version edited by Kadokawa Shoten,
published by Kodansha Sophia Shuppan, Tokyo, Japan, 2018
English version: Fay Aoyagi
*
秋ゆけり車を手放せるに似て
遠藤容代
aki yukeri kuruma o tebanaseru ni nite
Hiroyo Endo
autumn leaves
it’s like giving up
a loved car
autumn’s arrived
much like parting
with my car
Hiroyo Endo
Asu No Kaban (Bag for Tomorrow)
Hiroyo Endo, Furansudo, Tokyo, 2025
English versions: Alan Summers
*
春の日はできたての牛乳みたい
柊 琴乃
haru no hi wa dekitate no gyūnyū mitai]
spring sunlight
feels like
just produced milk
Kotono Hiiragi
Gendai Haiku, #728, February 2026 Issue,
Gendai Haiku Kyokai, Tokyo, Japan
English version: Fay Aoyagi
Direct translation:
“A spring day is like fresh milk.”
*
らんで餅に寝言のあるごとし
対馬康子
fukurande mochi ni negoto no aru gotoshi
Yasuko Tsushima
a rice cake looks
like talking in its sleep
puffed up
Yasuko Tsushima
Gendai Haiku, #720, June 2025 Issue, Gendai Haiku Kyokai, Tokyo, Japan
English version: Alan Summers
Direct translation:
It’s like a rice cake talking in its sleep.
*
木の葉舞ふ磁石のやうなハッシュタグ
満田三椒
konoha mau jishaku no yō na hasshutagu
Sansho Mitsuda
in the thick of it
hashtags like magnets
whirling leaves
Sansho Mitsuda
Gendai Haiku, #723, November 2025 Issue
Gendai Haiku Kyokai, Tokyo, Japan
English version: Alan Summers
Direct translations:
Hashtags like magnets, amidst dancing leaves.
Amidst the swirling leaves, a magnet-like hashtag.
*
___________________________________________________________________________________
A case of a kigo surviving the saijiki and kiyose tests (being published the next year,
and the next and the next…)?
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
若竹や鞭の如くに五六本
川端茅舎
wakatake ya muchi no gotoku ni goroppon
Bosha Kawabata
young bamboo−
five or six of them
like a whip
Bosha Kawabata
Haiku Dai-Saijiki (Comprehensive Haiku Saijiki),
Kadokawa Shoten, Tokyo, 2006
Fay’s Note: Bosha Kawabata (1897-1941)
English version: Fay Aoyagi
END
Are all of them simile?
And not in response to Keith or anyone else disliking “like” as I agree, it can be a clumsy way to represent a simile.
It was just a quick way to create a search pattern through Fay Aoyagi’s enormously helpful blog of modern onwards Japanese-language haiku.
Please see ‘like’ as a temporary indicator! (smiles)
寒月へ導火線めく終電車
安達昌代
kangetsu e dōkasen meku shūdensha
Masayo Adachi
COLLECTION:
Magao (Serious Look),
Haiku Collectio, Furansu-dō, Tokyo 2024
looking like a fuse
to the deep winter moon
the last train of the day
Masayo Adachi
English version: Fay Aoyagi
_________________
Direct translation:
–––––––––––––––––
The last train, like a fuse, leads toward the cold moon.
.
I love Fay’s version! A 17 syllable spread of 5-6-6.
The alliteration, which may have also been made verboten by western imperial decree, I vaguely remember we shouldn’t do it in the 1990s and maybe even earlier! Well, boo hoo to you!
I guess some non-Japanese editors would not like Fay’s version as being overly poetic though it captures hokku-haiku à la Japanese style so well.
________________
Each line is a joy:
––––––––––––––––
1.
looking like a fuse
2.
to the deep winter moon
3.
the last train of the day
What’s not to like, from “like to last” and ‘deep to day”!
(smiles)
Yes, I’d say they are all similes. And what makes them particularly useful to me is that they use a variety of simile markers and employ quite different strategies for establishing the comparison. That gives me plenty to work with in the series. 😊
…and in https://thehaikufoundation.org/moon-and-finger-9-the-past-part-1/
I gave:
闘牛士の如くに煤を払ひけり
tōgyūshi no gotoku ni susu wo harai-keri
—Soha Hatano
I cleaned the house like a matador
tr. Alex Fyffe
And it’s great to see that Soha Hatano’s work still appears in more than one saijiki in Japan as well.
______________________________
Here’s another possible simile:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
蟹歩き亡き人宛にまだ来る文
波多野爽波
kani aruki naki hito ate ni mada kuru fumi
Soha Hatano (1923-1991)
post still arrives
for the deceased
like a crab
Soha Hatano (1923-1991)
“Haiku” a monthly haiku magazine (February 2022)
Kabushiki Kaisha Kadokawa, Tokyo, Japan
English version: Alan Summers
.
Thanks for Sōha’s crab, Alan. Interesting.
蟹歩き亡き人宛にまだ来る文
kani aruki naki hito ate ni mada kuru fumi
crab-walking / deceased addressed to / even now comes mail
even now mail arrives crabwise for the deceased…
I suppose the zoomorphism “crab-walking” (which I render as “crabwise”) might be in my rough taxonomy of comparisons under “Compound synthesis”. Whether it is a simile or a metaphor, or either, I leave to Orense!
From a very quick search I gather that for the Kyoshi school, crab is an autumn kigo and it seems Sōha is using the parts of its hon’i that reflect slightly comic awkwardness, not meeting things head-on, and humility. For us, crabs are scavengers, which would add further resonance maybe, but that doesn’t appear to feature in its hon’i.
I see that Sōha’s watchword was ““The realm of shasei is the realm of freedom and a broad mind.”
I’ll add -wise to the taxonomy under “Modifiers”!
Thank you, Alan! More examples of simile for me to use in the series—all of them wonderful and new to me, except for the sun and moon peonies haiku, which is already on my list of examples. 😊
Your point about the wakatake haiku containing an explicit simile being taken up in saijiki and kiyose is particularly interesting. It futher demonstrates that the Japanese tradition clearly does not regard simile as unorthodox at all.
Thanks! I guess the Japanese are breaking many Western rules in haiku.
It’s neat that Soha Hatano (1923-1991) has appeared in more than one ongoing saijiki which is a great achievement.
Creativity is difficult to be stifled I guess!
I have a confession to make.
I am prejudiced against simile using “like”, not because of any fundamental principle, for it is useful; but because to my taste it is wearisomely over-used in what for want of a better word I’ll call “mainstream” poetry. It has become expected, almost, and frequently groanworthy, especially when “like…” appears several times in a dozen or so lines.
There is also the contemporary over-use of “like”, like. I read all these similes and I’m like bored to tears. Like I wouldn’t want it to come to contaminate haiku.
There, that’s off my chest. On with the show!
😂 Confession accepted, Keith!
And I think that distinction is important: a dislike of the overuse of “like” in contemporary poetry is quite different from a principled objection to simile itself. Any device can become tiresome when it becomes habitual or predictable. Perhaps part of what this series is trying to do is to separate our accumulated stylistic prejudices from the underlying poetic operations.
Part of why I’m making this simile series so extensive is precisely because I suspect that some of the resistance to “like” in haiku is a problem of habituation. As you say, “like” is ubiquitous elsewhere, yet comparatively rare in haiku, so it somehow gets caught between a rock and a hard place: simultaneously too common to feel fresh and too unusual in ELH not to feel jarring.
So one of my aims is simply to desensitise us through exposure. The more examples we encounter, the less conspicuous the word itself becomes, and the more we can attend to what the comparison is actually doing. 😂
@Adam Graham BASHŌ / MATSUTAKE / HON’I
I’ll divide my response in two for clarity.
On the question of hon’i in Bashō’s haiku, I wonder if we need to be careful not to make hon’i into a separate ideal object existing behind the physical thing. I don’t think the pine as a physical object and the pine as a poetic object are two independent entities entering into a metaphorical relationship. Our perception of the pine is already mediated by language, culture, memory, and previous encounters. The associations of pine — longevity, endurance, antiquity, dignity, and so on — are not simply added afterwards; they are part of how the pine is encountered by beings who think and speak the world.
At the same time, this does not mean that hon’i is a fixed essence attached to an object. It is continually renewed: the particular pine can confirm, complicate, or expand what “pine” means. The enduring dimension grows through the changing.
For the same reason, I would hesitate to think of the mushroom as having a weaker hon’i simply because it entered haikai later than the pine. Hon’i is not constituted only within the haikai tradition. The mushroom already carries associations from wider cultural experience, and its seasonal identity is itself part of its resonance. Its sudden appearance and disappearance, its emergence from the ground, its connection with late autumn, and even its earthy or bawdy associations would all have been available to Bashō.
Indeed, some aspects of the mushroom’s resonance require no established poetic tradition at all. Its fleetingness is available through ordinary encounter: it appears, then it is gone. That experience can itself become part of the accumulated meaning of the thing through repeated encounters and poetic use.
There is also an interesting contrast in terms of seasonality. The mushroom is strongly seasonal: its identity is bound to its appearance in late autumn. The pine, however, is not a kigo. In a way, the pine’s poetic “season” is precisely its lack of season — its evergreen quality, its endurance through winter, its resistance to ordinary seasonal change.
At first glance, then, the pine and mushroom seem almost to embody the distinction between fūeki and ryūkō. (I’m having Old Pond flashbacks here. 😄) The pine is the enduring: ancient, elegant, persistent. The mushroom is the fleeting: seasonal, sudden, particular. Yet Bashō complicates this opposition by bringing them into contact.
Kabureta is crucial here. The mushroom is not simply said to resemble the pine; it is affected by proximity to it. It is marked, irritated, perhaps even transformed through contact. Something rubs off, but neither thing disappears into the other. The ragged surface of the mushroom also seems significant temporally. In late autumn, it carries the marks of wear and age. The mushroom meets the pine not only in form, but in their relationship to time: the pine bears age through longevity, while the mushroom bears the marks of a season approaching its end.
The contact also transforms how we see the pine. Its bark might initially appear as a sign of endurance: rough, aged, resistant, and marked by the passage of time. But placed beside the mushroom, especially through the resonance of kabureta with irritation or a rash-like surface, that same bark can be perceived differently. Its roughness is no longer only a sign of permanence; it can also suggest fragility, exposure, and vulnerability.
The apparent opposition between the two therefore begins to dissolve. The mushroom’s fleetingness and the pine’s endurance may simply be different scales of perception. The mushroom appears and disappears within a short span, while the pine changes over a much longer rhythm. But both are processes rather than fixed states. The pine is not outside change, and the mushroom’s disappearance is part of a larger cycle of recurrence.
Through their encounter, each reveals something hidden in the other. The mushroom gives the pine a sense of fragility and immediacy; the pine gives the mushroom a sense of continuity and depth. The relation does not collapse them into sameness, but allows each to be seen more fully.
There may also be a psychological dimension to this relation. The poem suggests something we recognise in human experience: proximity changes us. Contact with another being can irritate us, unsettle us, or leave a mark on us, but it can also lead to imitation, transformation, or unexpected affinity. We remain ourselves, yet we are never entirely untouched by what we encounter.
In this sense, kabureta suggests the paradoxical nature of relation itself: what is different from us can affect us precisely because it is different. The friction between beings is not merely an obstacle; it can become the source of change.
Perhaps this is the deeper movement of the haiku: not that two things are secretly the same, but that through encounter each can reveal something in the other that was not visible before.
“Perhaps this is the deeper movement of the haiku: not that two things are secretly the same, but that through encounter each can reveal something in the other that was not visible before.”
This is Bashõ and the Dao, zoka: everything is connected, part of the same Creative.
Just a bit of clarification on my part: yes, the perception of a physical pine is “mediated by language, culture, memory, and previous encounters.” THAT entire package is what I mean by “Pine Physical Object.” I.e. the generic way we just encounter objects in the world. IN ADDITION TO THAT is a special type of mediation that generates cultural depth of a particular kind or particular experience with an object. In hon’i it’s a particulate type of mediation that has been constructed via consciousness decision of a culture, literally handbooks that say “This is what must be experienced when looking at the moon.” In many way it’s like contemporary Branding: generating automatic emotional reactions/experience when encountering an object. But the historic and on-going conscious curating of an experience of an object is the SPECIAL additionally quality of the mediation that makes it something like a hon’i or a Nike shoe or Santa Claus.
As such when you write, “I wonder if we need to be careful not to make hon’i into a separate ideal object existing behind the physical thing.” I think it IS a separate object; its a Hon’i Object. While all objects are mediated in the way you mention, not all objects have a hon’i object somehow involved with it. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Bashō used “bamboo” and “pine” as his examples, these are two objects that had strong hon’i. Bashō is basically saying INTERNALIZE the deep cultural symbolic value of the these objects so that you may parody or play or problematize them in a haikai-like fashion. Like, one has to reeeeeeaaaaalllly know the internal workings something before one starts experimenting with it. One has to be Branded before one can parody the Brand.
*
“Perhaps this is the deeper movement of the haiku: not that two things are secretly the same, but that through encounter each can reveal something in the other that was not visible before.”
Yes, simile does this perhaps more easily than metaphor which works toward a collapse into One, though of course alters the objects its bringing into the collapses/relation,
What I’m thinking about is that Simile and/or an explicitly stated metaphor is able to do the sort of operation under discussion because of pulling Speech front and center to be an equal element with the other elements in a haiku.
Biologically, a mushroom doesn’t correspond to a pine, but to a pine cone. One package of seed set out for distribution. Mushroom the plant itself is an underground network of fungal threads that produces the mushrooms we can see. It can be huge, inhabiting the area of many pines, and as far as I know may survive through many generations of pine.
Yes, this also makes me think of the ecological relation between fungi and trees. The mycelium beneath the ground often exists in symbiotic relation with plant roots, so the apparent separation between “pine” and “mushroom” becomes more complicated. Above ground they appear as distinct beings, but beneath the surface they may already be connected through a network of exchange. The correspondence Bashō creates resonates with a deeper reality of relation.
Sometimes science exceeds poetry. 😄
_____________________________________
To Learn of The Pine Go To The Fungi
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Despite many of humanity wanting only war, some are exploring peacefully the still unknown marvels of Planet Earth, and earth itself:
“Fungi primarily respond to the pine tree, as they can infect the tree through wounds or natural openings, leading to diseases like Pine Ghost Canker. Pine cones are part of the reproductive process of the tree and are not directly involved in the interaction with fungi.”
UC Davis
bspp.org.uk
https://www.bspp.org.uk/how-pine-trees-fight-back/
_____________________
Fungi and Pine Trees
––––––––––––––––––––––
Fungi form symbiotic relationships primarily with pine trees, specifically their roots. This association is known as mycorrhiza, which plays a vital role in enhancing the health and growth of pine trees.
Mycorrhizal Associations
Nutrient Uptake: Mycorrhizal fungi extend the root systems of pine trees, increasing their ability to absorb water and essential nutrients from the soil.
Stress Resistance:
These fungi help pine trees withstand environmental stresses, such as drought and poor soil conditions.
Soil Health:
The presence of mycorrhizal fungi contributes to improved soil structure and fertility, benefiting the entire ecosystem.
___________
Pine Cones
–––––––––––
Pine cones do not have a symbiotic relationship with fungi. Instead, they serve as reproductive structures for pine trees, facilitating the dispersal of seeds. While fungi may interact with the surrounding environment of pine cones, their primary symbiotic relationship is with the tree itself.
In summary, fungi symbiotically respond to pine trees, enhancing their growth and resilience, while pine cones are involved in reproduction and do not engage in such relationships.
https://plantarc.com/an-overview-of-mycorrhiza-in-pines-research-species-and-applications/
***
____________________________________
Do Not Pine for Me as I pine for you:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
an older heartbeat
the blur of a pine marten
on the glacier road
Alan Summers
Anthology: Yanty’s Butterfly Haiku Nook: An Anthology (2016)
Lake District, Cumbria, England, U.K. September 2015
*
Scots pine it breathes its cones far and over snow-lit stars
a’ Scots pine breethes its cones far an ower snaw-lit steers
Scots Gaelic
Alan Summers
Sundog Issue #1 ed. Joseph Fulkerson (July 2026)
*
wild pine tree scent
the wind wrapping a dog
around our legs
Alan Summers
Judges’ Favorites Selected Haiku
2025 Golden Haiku Competition
Anthology credit:
DOUBLE HORIZON
an international haiku anthology / une anthologie internationale de haïku
Editorial team/Equipe éditoriale: Jean Antonini, Gilles Fabre, Amanda Bell, Jean-Hugues Chuix and Françoise Saint Pierre (November 2025)
___________________
NOT THIS VERSION:
–––––––––––––––––––
wild pine tree scent
the wind wrapping LIKE a dog
around our legs
*
pine shadows:
the daydream ends
all tinsel-torn
Alan Summers
Publication credit: Frogpond 47:1, Winter 2024
_________________
HIDDEN SIMILE?
–––––––––––––––––
pine shadows:
the daydream ends
LIKE tinsel-torn
?
*
dark shelter how the fir cones burn
Alan Summers
Presence #78 (March 2024) ed. Ian Storr
*
let the ravens wind in the pines
Alan Summers
Publication credit: Weird Laburnum (November 2019) ed. Michael O’Brien
haikai/monostich series Mistero tre volte
FEATURE/Presentation:
Southern California Haiku Study Group May Conference Call Workshop
Travelling along the single line of haiku by Alan Summers (May 2020)
COLLECTION: by ink of crow pub. Call of the Page (November 2025)
.
The pine mushroom…
松茸や かぶれたほどは 松の形
matsutake ya / kabureta hodo wa / matsu no nari
matsutake: pine mushroom
ya: cutting word, exclamatory awareness (! or —)
kabureta: covered with, to be strongly influenced or affected by, imbued with
hodo: to the extent that, so much so that
wa: particle marking the topic
matsu no nari: pine-of-shape
pine mushroom—
so imbued with pine
it’s taken its shape
Reichhold in translation gives:
pine mushroom
with its ragged top it’s
like a pine tree
It seems that she has gone with kabureta as to be covered with something, to wear (on the head, from 被る, kaburu), or in some contexts, to be inflamed/irritated/get a rash. Rather than to be strongly affected by.
Leaving out the bawdy connotations of a new pine mushroom’s glans-like cap (which could lead to another suggestive interpretation entirely), the cap can look ragged as the mushroom matures and opens to release spores from its gills. But ragged is nowhere mentioned in the original, and it seems the interpretation is Reichhold’s choice.
There is not one of the usual comparison phrases, yō ni (“like”), or gotoku (“as if”), but something stronger in “hodo.” So affected is the mushroom by the pine that it has actually taken on its shape. It has, “to some extent,” become a pine. I think that’s somewhat different from a straight simile, although only in degree. I suppose we could say it has become like the pine, but that is different from saying that to some extent it is the pine, which is what I think Bashō was trying to convey here in his thought-provoking, zoka-following way.
Keith, I think the use of hodo is particularly interesting in haiku, and I’ll return to it in more detail later in the series. I don’t think comparison and scale are opposed. We distinguish equative and similative comparisons but in practice the line between them can blur. If I say that a baby mouse is about the size of a coin, I am not comparing the mouse and the coin in any general sense. I am comparing one particular dimension: size. The coin is simply a familiar reference point of scale.
But suppose we have:
park vending machine—
on the horizon the moon,
coin-sized
or even “about the size of a coin.” Am I really measuring the moon? Or am I comparing it to the coin? The measure is not chosen arbitrarily. The coin is brought into the poem because of what it allows us to see, and the result is something like an oblique simile: the moon is being made perceptually available through comparison without the poem having to say “the moon is like a coin.”
This is why I think grammatical appearance and poetic function need to be distinguished. A metaphor can wear simile’s clothing: “it runs like clockwork” does not really invite us to compare the thing to a piece of clockwork, but to apply to it the category of things that run smoothly, precisely and efficiently. A simile can wear a scalar approximative’s clothing; and a metonymy can wear metaphor’s clothing and so on. The surface form does not necessarily tell us what operation is taking place.
This is also why the history of what we now call “simile markers” matters. These forms did not necessarily begin as simile markers, and their development reveals something about the underlying operation of simile itself. I’ll return to that later in the series.
So I do think the Bashō matsutake haiku is a simile. What makes it interesting is not that hodo somehow falls outside simile, but that it gives Japanese haiku poets an oblique way of performing similative comparison through equative degree. And there is an interesting difference from an ordinary scalar comparison: hodo specifies the extent of the resemblance without specifying the particular trait being compared. With “about the size of a coin,” the dimension is given to us — size. Here, is it shape, surface, texture, appearance, or something else? The poem leaves that open. The degree of resemblance is specified, while the ground of resemblance remains for us to discover. Considering the rash/irritation aspect of kabureta, I wonder whether the ragged, worn texture of the mature mushroom cap is being compared to the bark of the pine.
As it happens I do have:
winter moon
half the size
of an upturned thumb
—Wales Haiku Journal Winter 2024-2025
—–
For me, hodo is somewhere along the line between simile (as I called “straight simile”) and a full-blown identification. As mentioned, a question of degree…
We also have to consider the word “almost” along this continuum. As in Alan’s:
the rain
almost a friend
this funeral
Alan Summers
First publication credit: Azami #28 ed. Ikkoku Santo (Japan, 1995)
The ‘almost’ suggests a very strong similarity but ‘not quite’ identicality.
Dawn
one pink cloud
shaped almost
as a question
—gembun anthology 1, July 2022
Keith, I think your examples are very helpful because they show how degree operates within comparison. I agree that there is a continuum here, but I would not see it as a continuum from simile toward identification. Degree exists within metaphor too. A metaphor can be relatively thin, where the shared category is only lightly suggested, or it can create the powerful feeling that two things are connected at a deeper level.
But identification itself is a framing, not a truth condition. When metaphor says “A is B,” it does not assert a literal identity between A and B; it invites us to perceive A through the frame of B. The strength of that framing can vary, but the relation remains one of perception and interpretation rather than a statement that two things are objectively the same.
Likewise, almost, just like, and very much like are all still comparisons. They specify the strength of the resemblance without necessarily removing the distinction between the two terms. “Almost” is especially interesting because it has something of the quality of a litote: it appears to weaken the statement while often intensifying the perception behind it.
Where I partly agree with you is that hodo has an interesting effect because it combines aspects of both an equative and a similative comparison. A phrase like “coin-sized” establishes a degree of equivalence along a clearly specified dimension. “Coin-like,” on the other hand, leaves the ground of resemblance open. It could refer to shape, appearance, texture, or other qualities.
Hodo does something between these two. Like “coin-sized,” it establishes a degree or extent of resemblance. But like “coin-like,” it does not necessarily specify the precise basis of that resemblance. It tells us how far the correspondence goes without fully telling us along which dimension it is being measured.
This is perhaps why it can give the impression of a more comprehensive relation. The structure of the comparison remains fragmentary — any comparison must be based on some particular quality — but because that quality is not explicitly named, the reader is invited to discover multiple aspects of resemblance.
But I still think the matsutake haiku is a simile. What makes hodo interesting is not that it lies somewhere between simile and identification, but that it provides an oblique way of performing similative comparison through degree while leaving the ground of resemblance open.
The poem specifies the extent of pine-ness, but makes us participate in discovering what that pine-ness consists of.
“If a thing is like something else, then best to talk about that other thing in the first place” — which seems to echo Bashō’s famous maxim: “learn of the pine tree from the pine tree.” Bashō indeed emphasizes direct observation and fidelity to the object itself…”
How does this shift understanding if Bashō was discussing “direct observation” not of the thing-in-itself-Pine, but rather direct observation of the hon’i-of-Pine as Kawamoto discusses in his “Poetics of Japanese Verse”? Essentially, something like: How is the hon’i of the Pine LIKE the hon’i of the mushroom? Which, um, whoa, I can’t even. Ha.
Yes, this raises a fascinating question about what “learn from the pine tree” actually means. I wonder if Gurga’s suggestion that a thing “like” something else should be replaced by that other thing assumes that comparison functions by substitution.
Bashō’s instruction is not simply “write the pine instead of anything resembling the pine.” It is an invitation to enter into the nature of the thing. But what the thing reveals may include its relations with other things.
The pine and the mushroom remain different objects, with different histories of poetic resonance. But those resonances are not static essences; they are continually renewed through encounters with the particularity of the thing. The enduring dimension of a thing grows through poetic encounters with its manifestations in the world.
This may be where fūeki and ryūkō become relevant. Haiku do not always negotiate these dimensions in the same way: some lean more strongly toward the immediate particularity of ryūkō, others toward the enduring resonances of fūeki. But for Bashō, the tension between the two is not something to be resolved; it is precisely the source of poetic energy. The fūeki is continually renewed through the ryūkō of individual encounters.
This is also where simile becomes interesting. In the relevant poetic sense, simile does not ask us to replace one thing with another; it allows us to perceive a correspondence between them while preserving their difference. The power of the simile is precisely that it creates a relation without collapsing one into the other.
I deliberately left Bashō’s haiku underexamined in the essay because I hoped it would open up exactly this kind of discussion. My preliminary remarks only touch on one aspect of it, and I think the poem has considerably more depth than that. I would be very interested to hear how you interpret the relation between the pine and the mushroom, and how you see the poem negotiating the interaction of their hon’i.
Within the dynamic of metaphoric gravity, the simile, as you mentioned, disallows a conceptual collapse of two (A and B) into one (A is B). The centripetal force of metaphor is the collapse into one, the centrifugal force of simile stabilizes the two into a balance. Within that balance much is gained, as demonstrated in your essay, and much is given up, e.g. the quarks of paraphiers. But the /balance is struck via the meta-use of language/.
A simile is basically a big arrow sign telling readers how to read the language being used in relation to any referent it’s gesturing toward. Language stepping forward in a non-transparent way allows the balance to be struck (this non-transparency is I’m sure Gurga and others’ thrust at No Simile rule).
Within the Bashō issue this is doubly complex, for there is a possibly a metaphor that is inherent to early hokku, the metaphoric reaction between “Pine as Physical Object” and “Pine as Hon’i Object” (and I say “possible” because Pine as Physical Object may not even be involved at all in Bashō’s work, which of late I’ve been drifting towards this idea; he may have been all about the conceptual/artist objects, but…)
Within the possible metaphoric relationship there is the entanglement of which is the tenor and which the vehicle in the “Pine as Physical Object” and “Pine as Hon’i Object” relationship.
And then operating onto this blurry metaphoric relationship comes the above haiku which uses obvious, non-transparent language to stabilize the gravity of meaning between the two items: pine (as Physical/Hon’i) and mushroom (Physical/Kigo [mushroom I believe pops up on the scene in early haikai, and thus has not yet developed a hon’i?]), but in doing so introduces a third body, Speech. The gravity of Speech pulls and pushes both of the other items, establishing a balance (or a stabilized contained chaotic dynamic) between it and the other two objects (mushroom (kigo)/pine). It is Speech that calls forth the stabilizing and containment of two separate entities (rather than metaphor collapsing them), into a metaphoric relationship yet allowing each to retain its individuated being. (For some reason the image of The Son, in Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, calling into the Abyss, using language to stabilize a portion of the Chaos such that atoms and molecules may form a stable physical universe is popping into my head).
Which is basically me talking out what YOU said, ha. But, there’s something’s about moving Speech (meta-speech) itself in the haiku, to a level equal to the literary objects (pine/mushroom) of the haiku that does interesting work. Like, if one had a haiku that in a meta-speech way made obvious the metaphor, is would cease being metaphor and act as a simile. For example,
petal on water
is a drifting thought
Even though its metaphor and not simile, it’s the act of Speech making itself obvious, of shouldering up to be an equal component in the haiku that keeps the items (petal/thought) apart, or as you write, “preserves the interval between the images and allows that interval to remain active.”
One way Speech shoulders in is simile, another way is hyper-explicit metaphor, another way is….?
Just thinking out loud.
Adam, I am much taken with your diglossic phrase “the quarks of paraphiers.” I must try it on drinking companions in the health club’s sports bar.
The quarks, or subtle and charming associations, are the same whether as simile or metaphor. While the ‘like’ or ‘as if’ of simile is—as you say—an arrow or pointer, and therefore ‘obvious’ (=’bad’ for some haiku critics), it is also weaker than a bold, assertive metaphor. I could argue that therefore it leaves more space for the reader (=’good’) to challenge and evaluate the comparison. It may be more credible. Consider the differences between:
like a bird on a wire
like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free
…and
a bird on a wire
a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free
In the original, the reader is invited into the verse to divine the attributes of such a bird, such a drunk, and assess how they apply to the speaker. The bird sings, the drunk sings, the poet sings, but they are nevertheless not free.
In the metaphoric / juxtaposed / parataxic version the poet asserts that he is that bird, that drunk, for the reader to accept or not. Which a critical reader, while seeing some similarities as above, is well entitled to doubt.
The simile both preserves space and partly bridges it. The juxtaposed metaphor, to a haikuist, completely bridges it.
Just playing devil’s advocate.
Thoughts on Bashō’s pine mushroom (not exactly a simile, Reichhold’s translation) follow later.
Another fine essay by Orense.
Keith, I absolutely agree with the notion that simile “could…leaves more space for the reader.” I think that’s what I was trying to say: It’s like a referee (a third party) holding two boxers apart to give them space. Speech enters the poem AS an element of the poem.
Kismet, just completed a 10-hour drive and listened to most of the Cohen catalog.
Leonard Cohen, like Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and many another are/were among the best poets of my generation during a period when unsung poetry lost its sound, its musicality, and became mired in earnest but dreary prose dressed up as verse. Hah!
Preparing to catch a train, will enjoy reading the article later!
I feel similes have been stated as a no-no in WESTERN HAIKU LAW but the practice where we contravened this has been consistent.
I would certainly look forward to both modern, and contemporary, examples, from other poets, whether their own or ones they’ve read over the years.
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Here’s a few of mine:
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petal-like moon
over Fukushima
consoling people
Alan Summers
Shichi Fukujin sequence
Notes from the Gean Vol. 3, Issue 1 (June 2011)
Collection: Does Fish-God Know (YTBN Press 2012)
*
how does this swan
sleep like a diamond
frosted moon
Alan Summers
Frozen Butterfly (October 2014) ed. John McManus
*
fifth kind encounter
humans replace crows
as an idiom of murder
Alan Summers
Prune Juice : Journal of Senryu, Kyoka, Haibun & Haiga
Issue 21: March, 2017
COLLECTIONS:
The Comfort of Crows
Hifsa Ashraf & Alan Summers
(Velvet Dusk Publishing, December 2019)
by ink of crow by Alan Summers
pub. Call of the Page (November 2025)
*
blink slowly the Jellicle cat is stealthy as a footpad
Alan Summers
Sōzō-mono sequence
Weird Laburnum ed. Michael O’Brien (1st September 2020)
*
turn in the weather . . .
a house sparrow sings
like buddha
Alan Summers
Anthology credit:
Amaravati Poetic Prism 2016
Curated by: Padmaja Iyengar
Publisher: Cultural Centre of Vijayawada & Amaravati (CCVA), Vijayawada
*
a dreaming forest busy as Hitchcock
Alan Summers
Publication credit:
weird laburnum ed. Michael O’Brien (May 2019)
Collection: The Comfort of Crows by Hifsa Ashraf & Alan Summers
(Velvet Dusk Publishing, December 2019)
Collection: by ink of crow (CoTP November 2025)
*
____________________________________
This one could have been written as:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
the rain
like a friend
this funeral
And it was almost “like” a friend, that curtain of privacy.
___________________
As it was published:
–––––––––––––––––––
the rain
almost a friend
this funeral
Alan Summers
First publication credit: Azami #28 ed. Ikkoku Santo (Japan, 1995)
Award credits:
Highly Commended, Haiku Collection Competition, (Snapshot Press 1998)
Joint 9th Best of Issue, Snapshot Five (1999)
Feature/Interview:
Meet… Alan Summers Interview by Gilles Fabre Seashores Issue 9 (November 2022)
Other publication credits:
Snapshots 4 (1998); Birmingham Words Issue 3 (Autumn 2004); tempslibre (2010)
Feature: Analysis of the Haiku structure (tempslibre, 2001)
Anthology credits:
First Australian Online Anthology (October 1999)
The Omnibus Anthology, haiku and senryu (Hub Haiku series 2001, Hub Editions)
Hidden (British Haiku Society Anthology 2002)
The New Haiku (Snapshot Press, 2002)
First Australian Haiku Anthology (Paper Wasp 2003)
The Temple Bell Stops: Contemporary Poems of Grief, Loss and Change
ed. Robert Epstein (Modern English Tanka Press 2012)
Articles:
On minimalism and other things DJ Peel Blithe Spirit Vol 9 No.3 (1999)
Travelogue on World Haiku Festival 2002, Part 2 (Akita International Haiku Network, Japan 2010)
Collection credit: The In-Between Season (With Words Pamphlet Series 2012)
Featured Poet:
Cornell University, Mann Library, U.S.A. Daily Haiku (Oct 2001)
Magazine feature: Seven magazine: “Three lines of simple beauty” (2006)
Online feature:
Blogging Along Tobacco Road: Alan Summers – Three Questions (2010) ed. Curtis Dunlap
.
A wonderful collection of examples, Alan. I can already see several interesting cases among them. Thank you for taking the time to share these — they’re a great reminder that, whatever the theoretical reservations about simile, poets have continued to find rich and varied ways of using it in haiku.