Moon and Finger 2 — Old Pond, Where It Begins
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.
Old Pond, Still New
I came to haiku on All Poetry.
It’s a platform with its own haiku culture but it exists at a remove from the main currents of haiku discourse: the journals, the established communities, and the people who have spent decades shaping the form and arguing about what it is and isn’t. A kind of accidental hermit, I read classical Japanese haiku and wrote there for four years before I had much contact with that larger haiku world, and in that time developed my own sense of what haiku does.
I’m a generalist poet — I write across forms — and I came to haiku with a background in literary analysis. Those were my natural tools. Confronted with contradictory signals and rules, I applied them to haiku because no one was there to tell me not to. I asked the questions a literary analyst asks: what is this form doing, how does it do it, why does it keep working? I treated haiku the way I’d treat any poem, with the assumption that what makes it alive is worth trying to name.
When I eventually encountered the wider haiku community, I found that these questions were not always welcome. Analysis is sometimes treated with suspicion — as though thinking carefully about what haiku does might damage the doing of it.
I hold the opposite opinion: that questioning, analysis, and theory are often part of haiku’s living practice. The great haiku poets did not separate poetics from practice, making from thinking. Neither will Moon and Finger.
We begin with “old pond”.
Not despite the fact that it is the most analyzed haiku in the tradition, but because of it. Familiarity is its own form of blindness — what is most seen is what is least noticed. “Old pond” was largely invisible to me before I decided to really look at it. That is probably true for most readers — the poem is so famous it has almost stopped being readable.
But something always remains to be seen, present from the beginning, in plain sight. Even with old pond.
What follows is a structural reading of Bashō’s poem, unfolding over three weeks. Part I maps the gap the poem engineers. Part II describes what happens at the moment of collision — the mechanism by which it continues to generate. Part III asks what this structure is for.
This essay is not a commentary on “old pond”, nor a historical overview of its reception and influence. It will not move sideways. It will stay with the poem and go deeper. Each week adds a level rather than a new direction. The argument requires the whole development to unfold for it to land — the payoff is proportional to the patience.
The readings are numerous. The water has not stilled.
Let’s jump in.
Part I: The Gap
old pond
a frog jumps in
the sound of water
That’s it.
Seventeen on. Three centuries of commentary.
Translations, Zen readings, philosophical glosses, parodies, defenses, attacks. The literature is vast and still expanding. The standard view is that the poem leaves space and readers fill it — but this describes the effect, not the cause. Many poems leave space. Very few generate this.
The first question worth asking is not what the poem leaves open but what it requires the reader to do. And that question has a precise answer — one that has been noticed in fragments before, but not fully assembled into a single account.
An account that explains not just why the readings are so numerous but why each one feels discovered rather than invented. Why three centuries of extraordinarily careful attention have not exhausted it. Why the reader who encounters the gap between the old pond and the frog feels compelled in a way they cannot quite name.
What follows is an attempt to name it.
1. A Threshold
The Japanese is:
古池や蛙飛び込む水の音
furuike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto
The poem opens with 古池 (furuike) — old pond, ancient pond; a compound in which the two characters are inseparable, the age (furu) belonging to the pond (ike) rather than describing it from outside. The kireji や (ya) follows, not merely as a pause but as a cut that simultaneously divides and binds, isolating what precedes it while elevating it into a poetic object, the old pond held apart before anything happens.
Then beyond the kireji’s cut 蛙 (kawazu) — frog, in its archaic poetic form, a classical spring kigo distinct from the more common kaeru — and 飛び込む (tobikomu), to jump in, to leap into, to plunge. Then 水 (mizu) — water — followed by の (no), the linking particle, and finally 音 (oto), sound, noise.
The second part’s two elements — a frog jumps in, the sound of water — arrive without syntactic bridge, causal marker, or conjunction between them, producing a non sequitur that nonetheless feels as though it should cohere. And the reader experiences this not as a choice but as a pressure towards coherence, a pressure that is not incidental to the poem but one of its primary mechanisms.
This pressure arises from the haiku’s two-part architecture created by the kireji’s cut. Robert Aitken observes that the second and third segments have no pause between them — they build as a single continuous movement toward the final word oto. That movement creates an expectation of relation that the reader naturally completes by resolving an ambiguity the poem holds. Japanese syntax leaves this genuinely open in a way English translations are often forced to resolve. The gap is not a failure of specification but a carefully engineered threshold.
I will call this threshold a half-cut. The term requires brief definition, since it is not a widely used term in haiku discourse. A half-cut, as I use it here, describes a cut where the two elements can be understood as separate or linked without either reading cancelling the other. The half-cut is not a weak cut in this definition — it is fully achieved. And what it achieves is structural ambivalence.
Faced with the half-cut’s threshold, three directions open.
The first is to hold the parts apart. Old pond. Frog jumps, sound of water. Two moments of presence allowed to resonate without being connected. No bridge is built because none is needed — the juxtaposition itself is the meaning, the gap the point. Read this way, the haiku becomes tripartite, and its force lies in its resistance to the two-part coherence the kireji seems to promise. It becomes refusal of relation. R.H. Blyth’s translation “The old pond; / A frog jumps in — / The sound of the water.” uses punctuation to guide the reader toward a mode of attention in which each segment appears as a discrete act of perception.
The second is to close the gap sequentially. The frog jumps in, and as a result there is the sound of water. The non sequitur is resolved by narrative logic. This reading’s strength lies in its simplicity and suchness: the splash is enough in and of itself. The relation is completed by the mere fact of occurrence which is how most prose descriptions of the poem operate, and how several translators have felt compelled to render it — Makoto Ueda’s “The old pond — / A frog leaps in, / And a splash.” imports a conjunction the Japanese does not contain, in order to complete this closure.
The third is to fuse the parts — to allow action and sound to cross rather than sequence or separate. In this reading the frog does not jump and then produce a sound. It jumps into the sound, the acoustic space becoming the destination rather than the result. Sam Hamill’s “At the ancient pond / a frog plunges into / the sound of water” and Jane Reichhold’s “old pond / a frog jumps into / the sound of water” both arrive at this possibility independently.
Old Pond’s translation history records this instability. The translations are endless because what the half-cut holds unresolved at the level of syntax becomes unstable at the level of cognition. The mind tries to settle the relation and cannot fully do so. The frog seems at once separate from the sound, causal to it, and already inside it.
What keeps the structure alive is not the presence of multiple meanings but the possibility of each held open without resolution. It is this suspension of certainty that prevents the gap from closing, even when it is crossed — the sense that the relation could be this way, without ever needing to be so. The reading enters a self-renewing loop, where the crossing continually generates new uncertainty.
The poem does not require the reader to choose among these responses, and it never confirms any one of them. However, this essay will pursue the third response — not because the synesthetic reading is the correct one, but because it has received the least critical attention and keeps the gap most alive for the purposes of this analysis.
2. Hearing the Poem
The primary lever of the synesthetic reading is that the poem places an immersive verb beside an acoustic event without fully specifying their relation. The poem even seems to invite sensory crossing in its sound structure. The “to” that opens tobikomu — the jump — is the same syllable that closes oto — the sound. The jump’s first syllable and the sound’s last are identical. And tobikomu ends with “mu”, a nasal resonance that dissolves rather than closes, opening directly into the mizu that follows — the water already present in the dying sound of the jump. Kawazu and mizu echo across the gap through a shared terminal -zu resonance: frog and water are already faintly linked before any contact occurs. The possibility of fusion is already present in sound, waiting to be heard.
There are, in fact, two distinct forms of synesthesia available in this reading. The first belongs to the observer, the second to the observed. One concerns how the scene is apprehended; the other what happens within it.
The first synesthetic crossing emerges through the frog. Tobikomu is not merely “to jump” but “to jump into,” a compound of tobu (to jump, to fly) and komu (to enter, be enclosed, be absorbed). The sense of immersion is therefore not supplied by the English preposition into. It is built into the verb itself. To jump with komu is not simply to move toward something but to pass inside it.
When the frog jumps into the sound rather than into the water, sound becomes something that can be entered — something that closes around what enters it. What the poem opens here is not a crossing between two specified senses, sound-to-touch or sound-to-vision, but something more radical: the conversion of an acoustic event into an inhabitable environment. And an environment is by definition multi-sensory. You do not enter a space with one sense.
Vision and touch are the most naturally summoned — enclosure is primarily spatial — but the other senses are not impossible. The poem leaves all of this open because tobikomu‘s logic of enclosure does not specify which senses are activated, only that enclosure happens. The synesthesia is therefore not a named crossing between two terms. It is an opening into a sensory field where multiple crossings are possible.
One might object that “jumping into sound” is merely a spatial metaphor rather than a genuine sensory crossing. But this objection misses what the verb is doing. The synesthesia is not imposed from outside by the reader. It arises from the collision between tobikomu‘s physics of immersion and the acoustic destination supplied by mizu no oto. The possibility of crossing is engineered by the poem’s own grammar.
And that crossing works in both directions. The second synesthetic effect is retrospective. One reading of the poem’s situation is that the haijin does not see the scene at all. The pond is nearby but out of sight. What reaches him is sound — the splash — and it is sound that calls the pond back into consciousness. The ya after old pond carries an exclamatory and realisatory force that most translations leave unmarked. It does not merely cut; by isolating what it frames, it imbues it with metaphoric charge, lifting the old pond into a pond of ages rather than a neutral object, while also marking a moment of sudden awareness: ah, the old pond. . .
Synesthesia then reflects the experience itself. The poet apprehends through hearing and reconstructs the visual scene from the acoustic event. The senses are crossed because in this moment perception is crossed. Sound gives rise to image. What emerges is a visual-acoustic intertwining at the level of perception. In this sense, the synesthetic reading places sound first in the phenomenological sense — not first in sequence, but first in the order of experience. The poem is not describing what was seen. It is faithful to what was heard.
These two synesthetic possibilities produce a doubling in which both sides of perception become unstable. Whether we treat these crossings as perceptual realities or interpretive possibilities, they alter how the event is experienced. Several effects follow.
The first effect is temporal. The synesthetic reading also captures something about the quickness of the event itself. The frog moves so fast that the senses cannot track the sequence of its action — the jump, the entry, the displacement of water, the sound rising. The steps collapse into each other and what reaches the haijin is not a scene unfolding in order but a single percussive instant. Synesthesia then is not decoration but precision: the rhetorically compressed rendering of a perceptually compressed event, too quick for perception to separate into stages.
The second effect operates at the level of agency. By arriving directly at the sound rather than showing the frog’s action completing itself, the poem renders the frog’s intervention curiously passive in its result. This passivity is also present in the other two readings but to a lesser degree. Sequence keeps the frog as agent, the pond as receiver, cause producing effect in the expected direction. The synesthetic reading reverses this. The acoustic seems to precede the kinetic rather than following from it. The frog disappears into what the water was already saying.
The third effect is structural. Juxtaposition keeps the gap intact, but once the parts are held apart the relation settles into a suspended balance — charged, but still — which is its own kind of resolution. Sequence closes the gap through causality, converting tension into closure and ending the movement. The synesthetic crossing, however, both connects and destabilizes, traversing the division without eliminating it and turning the relation itself into a site of instability. Jumping into sound is not a familiar experience; it resists domestication into cause, destination, or order. The reader does not arrive somewhere settled — the reading continues to turn, generating new uncertainty. Every attempt to fix the relation slips, and the gap reopens within it.
And it is through that living gap that the poem’s deeper structure begins to appear — a structure that multiple independent interpretive frameworks, arriving from entirely different directions, have each found a name for.
3. Felt Geometry
If the synesthetic reading remains compelling, it is because the crossing it reveals does not stay confined to perception. The same movement begins to appear elsewhere in the poem, at larger scales and under different descriptions. A broader pattern emerges — one that appears not only in readings of the poem but in Bashō’s own poetics.
Bashō’s writings repeatedly return to the productive tension between continuity and renewal in poetic practice, a dynamic later conceptualized as fūeki and ryūkō.
Fūeki — the unchanging, the eternal, the ground of tradition that persists beneath all individual expression. Ryūkō — the ever-changing, the contemporary, the poet’s living response to the present moment. Neither alone is sufficient: poetry without fūeki has no roots, poetry without ryūkō has no pulse. The great poem holds both immediacy and depth simultaneously.
The same tension can be described spatially as well as poetically. Fūeki and ryūkō have always reminded me of what the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson identified: two fundamental axes along which language operates. Every word a poet writes is chosen from a vast invisible reservoir of words that weren’t written. The word on the page carries the weight of everything it displaced. This vertical pressure — the depth of what was possible pressing up into what was chosen — is what Jakobson called the paradigmatic axis. The horizontal axis is sequence, one word following another in time. In ordinary language these two dimensions stay separate. Jakobson’s insight was that in poetic language they collapse into each other — the depth erupts into the surface, the reservoir speaks through the choice.
We can see this operating immediately in Bashō’s choice of kigo. Kawazu — the frog — arrived in the poem already carrying centuries of poetic association. Its hon’i, its poetic essence in the classical tradition, was its song — rendered with romantic or melancholy connotations of longing, of spring evenings, of the elegant emotional world of court poetry. That entire vertical reservoir — every poem that had ever used kawazu, every association accumulated around it, the whole paradigmatic depth of the word — was available to Bashō and to the reader who encountered his poem. Bashō selected kawazu but refused its hon’i. He chose the splash rather than the song — something that had never been explored as a poetic topic, something that violated the expectations the kigo carried. The full depth of selection revealed itself precisely because Bashō departed from it. The reader felt the weight of what wasn’t there — the song, the longing, the elegant tradition — and the splash arrived against that background of accumulated expectation. The horizontal axis carries the vertical depth with it. This is an illustration of Jakobson’s poetic function operating through a single kigo choice.
Haruo Shirane, in Beyond the Haiku Moment, identifies these same axes in Bashō’s poetics — the horizontal of the contemporary and the vertical of tradition. What appears here as critical vocabulary is already active in the poem. “To work only in the present,” Shirane writes, “would result in poetry that was fleeting. To work just in the past, on the other hand, would be to fall out of touch with the fundamental nature of haikai.” I want to suggest that “old pond” doesn’t just echo these concepts — it enacts them structurally.
The frog moves horizontally — through space, in time, a specific action at a specific moment. It is ryūkō made visible: the individual intervention, the contemporary, the new thing arriving into the existing world. Its movement is syntagmatic in the linguistic sense — one thing following another along the axis of time and action.
The pond is vertical — it has depth, it accumulates, it is the pond of ages. It is fūeki made visible: the unchanging ground, the tradition that was there before the frog and will be there after. Its existence is paradigmatic — not sequential but essential, not event but reservoir, the depth from which all selection is made.
The recurrence of this geometry across poetics and linguistics raises an obvious question: are these frameworks discovering the same structure, or merely imposing it?
Work on embodied cognition suggests verticality and horizontality are among the most basic spatial structures through which human beings organize experience. This geometry is therefore not invented by linguistics or poetics. The frameworks converge because they formalize intuitions already grounded in bodily experience: movement along a path, depth beneath a surface, accumulation below action.
The splash — the sound of water — is what happens when these two axes cross. The vertical depth of the pond erupts into horizontal sound, tradition made audible through the individual poet’s intervention. And this is precisely what Jakobson, writing in the twentieth century, identified as the defining operation of poetic language: the projection of the paradigmatic axis onto the syntagmatic, the vertical onto the horizontal, selection erupting into sequence. Bashō enacted this principle in 1686 without naming it. The structural homology is striking — not influence, not anticipation in any mystical sense, but two minds arriving independently at the same formal truth about what poetry does.
The gap is then not merely an interesting perceptual effect. It is the formal mark of the axes crossing. The senses become available to merge at precisely the moment the two principles meet — because what the poem renders is not simply a frog and a pond but the collision of the timeless and the timely. The half-cut invites sensory crossing because the experience itself is a crossing.
This is Bashō’s ars poetica rendered as image rather than stated as principle. The poem does not describe the relationship between fūeki and ryūkō — it enacts it, in a form fully honest to what that relationship actually is: not a hierarchy, not a resolution, but a crossing from which sound emerges, spreads, and gradually stills.
This reading is independent from whether we read the poem as synesthetic or sequential. Whether the frog jumps into the sound or merely produces it, the geometry of the poem remains intact — and part of the poem’s generative force lies in the unconscious resonance of that embodied geometry.
We’ve mapped part of it, but Jakobson’s account gets us to the crossing and stops. He describes the vertical pressing into the horizontal — tradition erupting into the individual moment, depth into surface. What he doesn’t describe is what happens at the moment of collision, when the axes don’t just meet but exchange. That exchange is the poem’s deepest event. It has been recognised repeatedly, under different names and from different angles, but to my knowledge never examined in depth. That is where we go next week in Part II Crossing.
Before turning there, however, it is worth pausing over one implication for contemporary haiku practice.
The half-cut we identified in Bashō’s poem has a practical dimension that bears on how haiku is currently taught and workshopped. In English-language haiku, the dominant teaching holds that a haiku should consist of a phrase and a fragment — two parts, cleanly divided. A haiku that produces three fragments, or that leaves the relation between its parts genuinely unresolved, is often treated as structurally deficient. In many workshop settings, stripped of its fame, I suspect “old pond” would be smoothed into conformity.
But the half-cut is not a structural failure. It is a different and more demanding achievement. What “old pond” demonstrates is that structural ambivalence — the gap held open, the relation neither closed nor refused — can be the poem’s engine rather than evidence of incompleteness.
The poem does not need mending. It needs reading.
This is not an argument against the phrase-and-fragment model or against workshops. Both are valuable tools. It is simply an observation that the dominant model does not fully account for what old pond is doing, and that a poet who understands the half-cut has access to a poetic resource the orthodoxy does not name.
If a theory cannot comfortably accommodate the tradition’s most famous poem, then that theory cannot be treated as exhaustive. “Old pond” suggests that the form is larger than any single account of it—and that many modern haiku employing half-cuts or other forms of structural ambiguity are not departures from the tradition, but continuations of possibilities already explored within it from the start.
Orense Nicod
Before Part II next week, reactions and questions are welcome.
Which of the three readings do you find yourself drawn to? Do you hold the parts apart, let the frog’s action produce its sound, or find the frog somehow entering the sound itself?
And does the gap feel like a problem to solve or a space to inhabit?
Take the poll and let us know what you think in the comments!
References:
Matsuo Bashô: Frog Haiku (Thirty-two Translations and One Commentary)
Shirane, Haruo. Beyond the Haiku Moment: Bashō, Buson and Modern Haiku Myths. Columbia University Press, 2000.
Jakobson, Roman. “Linguistics and Poetics.” In Style in Language, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok. MIT Press, 1960.
Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark. Philosophy in the Flesh. Basic Books, 1999.
(Embodied cognition; spatial structuring of thought.)
At the end of each post you will find a short anonymous poll related to the topic of the week (3 to 6 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.
Take this week’s poll and if you haven’t already take last week’s poll.
We would like to thank the poets who have sent in proposals and questions. Many interesting topics have been suggested for future study. Some naturally connect to subjects already scheduled for upcoming issues.
Haiku contest judging and the question of rules as a positive discipline will be discussed in Moon and Finger 6, the first Chorus issue, on 07/07.
Foreign words and scientific names in haiku will be explored in Moon and Finger 7 on 14/07.
The use of multiple kigo will be addressed in Moon and Finger 14 on 25/08.
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 part of her childhood in South Africa 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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Thank you Orense and Keith. A fascinating analysis of Basho’s poem. And thanks for the mention and appreciation of ‘nine iron’
I think that by analyzing this poem we can learn more about our way of perceiving the world, if we want and have the courage to acquire such knowledge.
“The frog moves horizontally — through space, in time, a specific action at a specific moment. It is ryūkō made visible: the individual intervention, the contemporary, the new thing arriving into the existing world. Its movement is syntagmatic in the linguistic sense — one thing following another along the axis of time and action.”
“The pond is vertical — it has depth, it accumulates, it is the pond of ages. It is fūeki made visible: the unchanging ground, the tradition that was there before the frog and will be there after. Its existence is paradigmatic — not sequential but essential, not event but reservoir, the depth from which all selection is made.”
Contrary to this interpretation: The frog is fūeki, the kigo, timeless, always the same; the pond is ryūkō, grown old (and overgrown) through time.
Spoiler alert! :)
Yes—and this pattern of reversibility also appears at the semantic level. Kawazu is the more archaic term, while furuike ya is, in a sense, the more unexpected choice within the haiku tradition. This inversion is part of a broader pattern of reversals that I discuss in Part II.
I would like to translate the last line as “blub,” because that’s what a frog jumping in without making a splash sounds like to me. But would anybody else hear it the way I do?
I like “blub.” Very descriptive.
I love the onomatopoeic interpretations of the third line – true translations. I hear “plip”.
This poem, article, and comments have been on my mind quite a bit. Interestingly, I have started some non-haiku translation projects as well in the past few months. I don’t speak a lick of Japanese but have consulted some online resources. I am curious if anyone has thoughts on this translation:
oldpond
a frog’s plunge into
the sound waves of water
Which I leave without further comment or justification (at this point.)
A beautiful translation, but it separates the frog from the water. Is this too far-fetched a distinction? It depends on which direction we want to take our understanding of the subject. Whether we want unity or independence. How independent we are.
“The poem opens with 古池 (furuike) — old pond, ancient pond; a compound in which the two characters are inseparable, the age (furu) belonging to the pond (ike) rather than describing it from outside. The kireji や (ya) follows, not merely as a pause but as a cut that simultaneously divides and binds, isolating what precedes it while elevating it into a poetic object, the old pond held apart before anything happens.”
For me, this alone is enough to dwell on for now, or for a long time.
Of course there are concerns about translation, but also about the poem having been written about 350 years ago. One can only wonder how Basho’s contemporaries would have heard this poem— in what way they would have understood it. Was it beyond its time then, as it still may be now? (The timeless is always beyond its time.)
I would like to know how a Japanese speaking person now hears furuike. As a visualizable object, or as a state of mind? What Orense suggests is that it refers to a state of mind, a kind of merging of *the pond’s oldness* with *oldnesses’ pond*. If this is the case, perhaps it is not a stretch to say that furuike relates to consciousness, the consciousness with which one enters the poem. Ordinary consciousness, in other words. What follows, changes that, or at least, changes the perception of it. Brings consciousness to consciousness. (In a certain way, one can say that something does not exist until consciousness jumps in. Even consciousness.)
Thank you, Peter—this is a very rich set of reflections.
I think the compound nature of furuike is worth drawing attention to (that’s why I mention it :), but I would be cautious about building too strong a claim on it in isolation. Compounds are entirely normal in Japanese, so grammatically there is nothing unusual here.
At the same time, I’m not convinced grammar is ever fully neutral. Even when conventional, grammatical structure shapes how meaning is organised and how perception is framed. In that sense, grammar is often very close to ontology—it determines how entities are brought into relation and how they become available to thought.
So I would not want to overstate the uniqueness of furuike as a compound, but I do think it is legitimate to say that its grammatical form participates in shaping the poem’s ontological feel: it presents “old pond” not as a description added from outside, but as a minimally constructed unit of perception.
I suspect the kireji や (ya) may be more important in producing the “state of perception” effect you’re pointing toward. Because it suspends and isolates what precedes it, it momentarily holds old pond as a complete perceptual unit before anything else occurs. This intensifies it and gives it a certain weight or charge.
Your formulation of the cut as something that reorients perception itself is very suggestive, and it touches on a similar idea I develop further in Part III.
Perhaps it takes a thousand ponds and a thousand frogs for understanding to occur. Some skills develop gradually, others require overcoming an internal barrier, and still others require a leap. The frog has already made the leap and knows what it’s all about.
Thank you, Urszula—that’s a lovely way of putting it.
I think that may turn out to be quite closely aligned with where the essay is heading, but I can’t give any spoilers at this stage. ;)
The joyful anxiety of waiting is priceless :)
Well done. I very much appreciate the discussion of half cut and choice between closure and resonance. You make the point that the construct of vertical and horizontal axes has been established through embodied cognition to be an inherent cognitive perceptual process. In one of your next essays could you summarize briefly the supportive evidence of that? Looking forward to the future essays
Thank you, Tim—that’s a helpful question.
Moon and Finger aims to create a freer environment than a strictly academic setting would allow, so references are necessarily selective rather than exhaustive, and claims are not always hedged to the same degree that formal academic writing demands.
I included George Lakoff’s and Mark Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh in the short list of references to signal one of the directions from which I arrive at these ideas, and I will develop that further in Part II.
Your question has actually given me something of an epiphany. I was using Lakoff and Johnson in a relatively limited way, but they may be more relevant to understanding the poem than I originally thought.
Cliffhanger :)
Thank you Orense, I’m a retired clinical psychologist and I think the embodied cognition approach has a lot of merit
What strikes me about this discussion is how it highlights the limits of translation. When discussing the different interpretations of the haiku, you mentioned different translations that support different interpretations, and in researching other translations, I found many that do so even more strongly, often to the outright exclusion of other possible interpretations. It’s so easy for meaning to be lost in translation simply because the translator doesn’t notice it, or doesn’t think it’s important. On the other hand, meaning can also be added; I don’t speak Japanese, so I’m mostly forced to take your word for it that any of these interpretations are actually present in the original poem.
It’s not uncommon for the last line of this haiku to be translated into a specific onomatopoeia, like “splash”, which injects a concrete sensory image into the line that the original, as far as I can tell, lacks. And on the subject of the last line, it’s interesting that most translations reverse the word order, which I think loses some of the original’s effect, especially in the synesthetic reading. The second line poses the question, “What is the frog jumping into?” And the third line immediately offers the obvious, and already established, answer, “water”, before pulling the rug out from under us with “sound”. The effect is better captured by William J. Higginson’s translation, “Old pond… / a frog jumps in / water’s sound.” Though, this translation actually skews away from the synesthetic reading by not including an article at the start of the third line, making it less intuitive to read the two lines as a complete phrase. If I may indulge a more radical approach, if one wanted to emphasize this effect, and weren’t too bothered about preserving the original’s structure, one could translate it along the lines of, “old pond / a frog jumps into the water / ‘s sound.”
That is the fun of it though, isn’t it? Of translation, I mean. One poem becomes dozens of variations, each reflecting the biases, goals, and perceptions of its translator, in negotiation with those of the author, and each in conversation with the others. Differences between languages force different approaches to the same goals, different solutions to the same problems, different compromises to the limits of the form. New interpretations are revealed or created outright, new subtleties fill the gaps of those lost. I’m still fairly new to haiku practice, and I’ve mostly engaged with original English haiku over translated Japanese ones, I think in part because I fear the originals will be done no justice by the translations. Perhaps this is a signal to start broadening my horizon in that direction.
Thank you, Sean.
I think you’re absolutely right that translation plays a major role in shaping how we experience this poem. The range of English versions is striking, and small choices often foreground very different interpretive possibilities.
One thing I find particularly interesting is how often translations introduce onomatopoeia such as “splash” or “plop.” While these can feel natural in English, I’m less drawn to them, partly because Bashō seems to be moving away from immediacy in that sense. Rather than naming the sound through imitation, the poem ends with the more open formulation “sound of water” (or “water’s sound,” as you note). The fact that it ends on “sound” does not, in my view, prevent a synesthetic reading, but it does create a kind of delay or moment of revelation, which your translation foregrounds.
That final phrase feels important to me. It does not pin the experience down to a specific acoustic effect, but leaves “sound” itself as something more general and less contained. What we are left with is sound as such rather than a fully specified sensory event. It is this openness that, for me, allows for resonance rather than closure—something onomatopoeic translations tend to reduce.
At the same time, I would be hesitant to say that we are simply at the mercy of translators. One reason I have tried to return repeatedly to the Japanese text is not because it can settle every interpretive question, but because it provides a shared point of reference. The original remains there, resisting some readings, supporting others, and occasionally surprising us.
And I hope you do broaden your horizons in that direction. While no translation can perfectly reproduce the original, the accumulated history of translations can itself be illuminating. Read side by side, they reveal not only the poem, but the remarkable range of responses it continues to generate.
And yet another translation joins the waters of “old pond” :)
The discussion about the location of the cut and the concept of “half-cut” is a fundamental concept to the form of haiku. Did you notice how the full cut occurs about 1/3 of the way into the poem and the half cut further destabilizes the poem into further section creating asymmetry—exemplifying the Japanese aesthetic concept of fukinsei. In other words, the poem cuts into 5 and twelve and then again into 5 and 7 syllables. Asymmetry is so fundamental to Japanese poetry that it rarely gets mentioned—although it underlies the entire concept of “phrase and fragment” as well as the multiple cuts in superposition in a monoku.
Compare this inherent asymmetry to a western poetic form like the villanelle. It’s not precisely the same BUT the tercet (hmm…a haiku is also a tercet), the repetons, and rhyme scheme (aba aba…) destabilize the form just like a haiku. Makes you wonder why villanelles are still written today but heroic couplets—not so much.
For a free verse example, consider Plath’s Ariel material. It’s full of tercets and weird rhymes and half-rhymes which destabilize the poem and encourage forward momentum. Also using the concept of asymmetry to propel a poem forward.
Thank you, Joshua. We’re working on a piece for later in the year on ‘cutting’ and cuts in their various forms.
Bashō uses his formal ‘cut’ plus semantic ‘half-cut’ technique in several of his mature poems. Coupled with Japanese speech patterns in a 5-7-5, and calligraphy that when not on one line, was on three, perhaps we should not be so quick to conclude that “a haiku consists of two parts.” Already over three centuries ago, Bashō was thinking in more than two parts. To be followed by some others in the home of haiku. What do you think?
On villanelles, they may appeal to poets with a “crossword mentality” and (as you’ve no doubt tried) are hard to write by the time you get to tercet 5 and the closing quatrain, and are straining for yet another meaningful rhyme, even if you are Dylan Thomas! But they are ideal if you have two really good lines to hammer home through repetition. We all know
“do not go gentle into that good night …. rage, rage against the dying of the light”
— but can you remember any other line from that splendid villanelle without looking it up again?
Back to asymmetry: yes. Although the 5-7-5 pattern itself has symmetry until cut. Perhaps mentioned less often in the context of anglophone haiku as our ears in English poetics are tuned more to rhythmic meter? How about sending us an illustrated discussion piece on symmetry / asymmetry?
Yes, I do agree with you on the cuts. I have personally strained against haiku as being divided in to merely two parts. I think a haiku starts in two parts divided by the kire—and then is divided and subdivided again (often). Even a tiny poem like a haiku can have several syntactical units and multiple meanings and interpretations.
I think we’ll just need to agree to disagree about the villanelles which I probably should not have brought up on a haiku forum.
Back to the asymmetry discussion, I have been writing down my thoughts—something might come of it.
Joshua: Villanelles &c: It is I who was out of order, teasing about villanelles.
One of the subjects we hope to address eventually is what kind of relationship haiku has with other poetry, so mention of villanelles in that context (here, repetition and progression, perhaps) is not out of context. Only the other day, Orense and I were talking about some broad similarities between the haiku and the sonnet. More anon, but not soon.
Asymmetry (and imperfections) and its dynamics is very much part of Japanese thinking and aesthetics. It seems we often consider haiku as an isolated manifestation of art, but the same aesthetic framework informs other arts in the country of its birth. Think ikebana…
And we look forward to your thoughts on asymmetry, should they reach the form of an outline proposal.
When I first started writing haiku, which was very early on in my mid-life return to writing, I was astounded at the differentiation between “haiku” and “mainstream poetry.” I have often seen phrases like “he writes poetry and haiku” etc. which always makes me laugh a bit. I have come to appreciate both “Haiku World” and the poetry world at large. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Ultimately, I have ended up publishing haiku in mainstream journal and haibun with form poems as the prose section in haiku journals.
I have long viewed the tanka (really, the waka) as the counterpart to sonnet. How different, really, are Astrophil and Stella from tanka exchanges from The Tales of Ise? Both have similar themes, purposes, and form (both forms often contain a volta as a key poetic technique).
I think the real correspondence (and I am working on an essay on this) is between the triolet and the haiku. Both are the shortest form poems in their traditions and both (as has been noted elsewhere in the comments) rely recursion as to develop meaning. Of course, haiku’s recursion is much more subtle and fractal than a triolet’s.
Not to disagree with your points about asymmetry, but I agree with Keith that there is also symmetry in traditional Japanese haiku structures, and in many English language haiku in terms of syllables (as long as the symmetry is not 5-7-5, which is almost forbidden). I tend to feel that ‘phrase and fragment’ imposes structure on something which is much more flexible and free form (in English anyway), and writing in strict ‘phrase and fragment’ produces homogeneous haiku which are not really asymmetric but are structured in a highly stylised way. It goes back to the old form vs free form arguments in poetry.
Haiku “feel” to me just like other formal verse does. A sonnet or villanelle might start with a memorable phrase with an interesting cadence (perhaps in iambic pentameter, perhaps not) and unfolds in similar sounding phrases and syntactical units, that fit into a predetermined pattern.
In my (admittedly a bit odd) mind, the haiku starts with two unequal images with a caesura in between them. Sometimes they get more complicated than that. The creative genesis of a haiku “feels” the same to me as any other poem, apart from the specific cadence of a haiku. Said another way, haiku have a cadence—a short poem with at least one strong caesura. Even when writing a multi-cut monoku, the initial spark of the haiku starts with the cadence of a single cut.
What do you think about free form poetry?
It’s very, very difficult to do well. In my practice, it’s a real event when I write a true free verse poem. Like once a year or so.
Most “free verse” that is published, and I mean like 80%+ or maybe even 90%+is just lineated prose. Poetry needs to “sound” to develop meaning.
Thank you, Joshua.
I think your point about asymmetry is an important one. The tendency is often to think of the cut as dividing the poem into two parts, but as you note—and as Keith’s comment above also suggests—once we begin to consider the half-cut and the various syntactic possibilities available in the poem, the structure becomes considerably more unstable than a simple binary division might suggest.
What particularly interests me is that the asymmetry may itself conceal a deeper symmetry. The second part of the poem seems almost to recapitulate, in miniature, the movement of the whole. Yet the symmetry is never complete. The poem appears to oscillate between symmetry and asymmetry, inviting us to perceive patterns only to complicate them. That tension may itself be part of the poem’s instability and help explain why it resists settling into a single structure or reading.
I also like your observation that asymmetry often goes unremarked because it is so deeply embedded in Japanese poetics. It can become almost invisible through familiarity. Yet it may be doing a great deal of work in shaping how the poem unfolds and how our attention moves through it.
Your comment has certainly given me something to think about.
There are different kinds of symmetry for sure. I like to think of this haiku unfolding like a fractal—self-similar at different scales. Many of the best haiku are like this.
Hi. I am a beginner. On our plot is a pond. ( there are a lot of frogs here :) Most of the time, I only heard the splash – the frog saw me long before I saw it. But sometimes, very rarely, I saw it happen. And even then, it was almost impossible to see where it landed. By the time I looked, it was gone – only ripples remained.
That taught me that in Bashō’s haiku. The power lies in its order:
First, the old pond – stillness, timelessness, the eternal background. Then, the frog jumps – Bashō must have seen it; otherwise, he couldn’t have known it was a frog. He witnessed the action. Finally, the sound of water – the splash reaches us after the frog has already disappeared.
The cycle is complete: old pond → frog jumps → sound → ripples fade → return to stillness.
The poem is imo not about the frog or the splash. It is about the temporary disturbance of an eternal silence – and the return to that silence.
This makes me wonder if the poem’s power doesn’t just come from the gap between the parts, as the essay suggests, but also from the cycle it completes – disturbance, then stillness returning.
Thank you, Henk.
I particularly enjoyed your observation that most of the time we hear the splash without seeing the frog. There is something wonderfully concrete about bringing actual experience with ponds and frogs into the discussion.
I also think your description of the cycle is very compelling. Whether or not one agrees that Bashō must have seen the frog, your reading draws attention to something important: the poem does not end with the frog. It ends with sound. What follows after that sound is left for the reader to imagine.
The reading you describe has much in common with a long tradition of Zen Buddhist interpretations of the poem, which I will be discussing next week. What I find particularly interesting is that you arrive there not through philosophy or literary criticism, but through your own observations of ponds and frogs. Different paths, perhaps, leading to a similar reading.
Henk: “It is about the temporary disturbance of an eternal silence – and the return to that silence.”
That’s broadly how I see it, too, if forced to pick an interpretation. The transient, active, living world set against the inanimate environment that enfolds it. As with “quietness / penetrating the very rock / the cicada’s cry” —perhaps.
During the brief span where we see the frog (at least in our mind’s eye) and hear the sound as it combines with its natural element, there’s a flash of ‘knowing’ before the frog and the sound disappear and the pond returns to the stillness of ages. And more contextual ‘surplus meaning’ with which to invest the verse beyond that, if one wishes. More to come.
It might prompt recollection of Wendell Berry’s “How to be a Poet“:
Accept what comes from silence.
…….
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.
Thank you Orense and Keith! Also for the link! I have to think of the scale it can stand for a breath but also much bigger in my imagination on a universal scale of live?
One thing comes to my mind..
Is it possible that these is written from a “dry landscap garden” meditation setting as an exercise.? Raked gravel and stone frogs and turtles are also part of the tradition.
Sorry if I don’t add much to the discussion. Thank you!
For the moment, I want mainly to express my gratitude and appreciation for the level of care that has gone into this. Truly and clearly a labor of love, which will, I believe, ramify.
Thank you, Peter.
That means a great deal coming from you.
I’ve come back to “old pond” repeatedly over the years from different angles until, gradually, it began to crystallize into a larger account. In that sense, this essay is less the result of a single sustained investigation than the convergence of many separate reflections that accumulated over time.
I began with what I thought would be a relatively modest exploration of a familiar poem, only to discover that the deeper I looked, the more there seemed to be to look at. Whether that says something about the poem, the reader, or the nature of interpretation itself remains an open question.
In any case, I am grateful for your encouragement and for your confidence in the project. I hope the remaining installments prove worthy of it.
Thank you for this thoughtful analysis, and I look forward to the further parts. I think that Basho’s poem can be seen as a sound poem, and for many English translations the third line may be referring both to line one and two. This may not be consistent with the structure of the Japanese original – and I am glad that you are relying on those Japanese characters to generate support your interpretations. Those collections of English translations of this poem are extremely enlightening.
Thank you, Mark.
A sound poem—that is a wonderful formulation. And there is a paradox at the heart of the poem: Bashō very deliberately avoids using onomatopoeia. Japanese is especially rich in onomatopoeic expressions, so it was not a lack of options that led him to choose mizu no oto (“sound of water”), a much more abstract way of referring to sound. I think that choice is significant and I will touch on that in part II next week.
I also think you’re right to point to the role of translation. The collections of English versions are fascinating because they reveal just how many different poems seem to be latent within the original. Small decisions about syntax, punctuation, lineation, and even the relationship between the final phrase and what precedes it can have significant interpretive consequences.
For that reason, I’ve tried wherever possible to return to the Japanese text itself. Not because it can settle every question, but because it provides a common point of reference from which different interpretations and translations can be compared.
One of the surprises of this project has been discovering how much of the poem’s interpretive history is also a history of translation.
I found your analysis fascinating and refreshingly ambitious. Your discussion of ambiguity as a generative force feels especially valuable, since so much contemporary haiku criticism leans toward resolving rather than preserving uncertainty. That said, I occasionally felt the analysis drifted from illuminating the poem to building an elaborate theoretical framework around it. But any essay that makes me look at old pond with fresh eyes has accomplished something worthwhile.
Thank you, Caleb.
I’m especially pleased by your comment about ambiguity. One of my concerns with some approaches to haiku criticism is that they can treat ambiguity as a problem to be solved rather than as one of the poem’s central resources. In a poem like “old pond”, I suspect part of its enduring power lies precisely in its resistance to being reduced to a single stable meaning.
I also think your criticism is a fair one. There is always a danger that a theoretical framework begins to generate its own momentum and starts to tell us more about itself than about the poem. My hope is that the concepts I introduce function less as explanations and more as tools for noticing things that might otherwise remain invisible.
That said, the aim of the essay is not to arrive at a single interpretation of the poem. Rather, in the next installment, I’ll be looking at several other frameworks that have been applied to “old pond” and, to some extent, leveraging them against one another. Each seems to illuminate something real about the poem, yet none appears capable of exhausting it. I’m not trying to determine what the poem means, but what sort of object it must be to generate the history of readings that it has generated. I’ll be interested to see whether your impression remains the same by the end of the series.
I would also add that not all of the frameworks occupy the same status in the essay. Concepts such as fūeki and ryūkō are not foreign theoretical impositions but part of Bashō’s own critical vocabulary. Jakobson, by contrast, is being used more modestly—as a supporting lens for exploring Bashō’s poetics rather than as an explanatory master key.
In any case, I’m delighted that the essay encouraged you to look at old pond with fresh eyes. That is ultimately the goal.
What was very interesting for me was your comment about this poem being almost unreadable. Given its fame, as the world’s best known haiku, I had read it in various forms and guises over the years. When I started writing haiku last year I revisited it and I must say was failry non-plussed as to why it was so famous.
It was only when I read a translation that conveyed that the frog jumps into the sound of the water, that everything is happening simultaneuosly that the haiku came alive for me. As a result of that insight, in my own writing, I started to play with using the Present Continuous to convey simultaneous action in my haiku and still do now and then.
I also found the idea that Basho may not necessarily have witnessed this – that he heard the sound only and drew the haiku from that fascinating. I am very interested in “who” the author and reader are in any haiku and “where” they are and think that, even though we only have 3 lines and 17 syllables such questions are valid and worth exploring.
Other than that – great – well done! Wonderful to read some well argued literary analysis of a haiku. We need more of it. Thank you!
Thank you, Morgan.
Your experience is actually very close to my own. I think many readers come to the poem expecting immediate revelation because of its reputation and are instead left wondering what all the fuss is about. Part of the challenge is that the poem is deceptively difficult to translate, and small choices can dramatically affect how we experience it. The sense of simultaneity you mention is one of those things that can suddenly bring the poem to life.
I’m also pleased that it found its way into your own writing practice. That is often how literary analysis is most useful—not as an explanation of a poem, but as a way of becoming more attentive to the possibilities available to us as writers.
As for the question of whether Bashō actually witnessed the frog, I find it fascinating precisely because it forces us to think about where the poet is situated in relation to the poem. Like you, I’m very interested in questions of who is speaking, who is perceiving, and from where. Even in a poem as brief as this one, those questions can profoundly shape our reading.
The present continuous is often discouraged in haiku writing for reasons I do not entirely agree with. Questioning that particular piece of received wisdom could be an interesting topic to explore. I’ll add it to the list.
And thank you for your kind words. I think haiku benefits from both approaches: writing poems and thinking carefully about how poems work. The two activities enrich one another.
I have always wondered why it should matter whether the pond was old or new. But when you took away the adjective, it was like saying “Taj Mahal” rather than “beautiful building.” A single concept that creates a meaningful, multifaceted image. You opened my eyes to this haiku. Thank you!
Being curious, I immediately checked to see whether I too had written haiku where the universe is contrasted with with some little act, and yes, I found a few. Like this, one of my earliest haiku:
Spring sunshine
a young girl parades
her new pair of tits
Then I got curious about whether it would be o.k. to show the little action first and then the universe. I think I may have done it with this one:
Minnows in my creek
so slowly
moves the sun
I’m enjoying your lesson, even though I haven’t studied poetry and much of this goes way over my head.
I think that the ‘old’ is rather important here, John, and Bashō wouldn’t have included it otherwise; let alone have been so pleased with this first line. It is charged with both overt meaning and also meaning on a meta-level. The emphatic cutting-word ‘ya’ comes right after, suggesting that this (“old pond”) is more than just a setting. A side-by-side comparison is invited by the formal cut, as well as a contemplation (or perhaps, in context, ‘a reflection’). But I won’t steal Orense’s thunder in the two further posts!
Thank you, John.
I particularly like your observation that removing “old” is not simply removing an adjective. I touch on the implications of this choice next week. The story Alan references, where Bashō discards yamabuki or “yellow irises,” is illuminating in that respect. Instead of beginning the poem with a seasonal object, he chooses furuike and begins the poem with a condition of being. That changes everything.
I’m also glad the essay prompted you to look back at your own work. The question of whether the larger frame comes first or second is an interesting one. In Bashō’s poem, the old pond establishes the condition through which we experience the frog and the sound. In other poems, as in your minnow haiku, the movement can work in the opposite direction, with the small local perception opening outward onto something larger.
And thank you for reading so attentively. If some of it feels as though it’s going over your head, you’re probably giving me too much credit! If anything, Jakobson may be the part that feels most technical, but the underlying idea is much simpler than the axes terminology suggests. If you have questions, don’t hesitate to ask. Much of what I’m trying to do is simply slow down and look carefully at things that are often taken for granted.
I wonder if most authors consciously achieve a certain effect with their work, or if it’s more a result of their brilliant intuition and experience, or sometimes even a coincidence.
Perhaps the interpretation of a work that’s generally accepted and understood is what surprises the author most.
Thank you, Ursula — this is close to a question I find myself returning to often.
My instinct is that ‘old pond’ is something of a perfect storm: Bashō clearly had conscious poetics, the fūeki/ryūkō tension was something he thought and wrote about directly, but I’d guess there’s also an element of auspiciousness on top of the brilliance, something beyond what any poet fully controls.
That said, in literary analysis we try to avoid the intentional fallacy: the belief that an author’s intention is ever fully accessible, or that it would settle the question even if it were. The text is what we can actually work with. Many of the effects I trace in the essay, the phonetic patterning in this part for instance, operate below the level of full consciousness. They’re conditions, factors that may shape a reading, not claims about what Bashō meant or knew.
As for the second half of your question, I suspect you’re right, and it might be the most honest measure of a poem’s depth: when its accepted reading is one the author wouldn’t have predicted, but recognizes once it’s shown to them.
I believe that talking it out with at least two students helped him get to the finished verse:
A Story of Collaboration
Kikaku’s Draft:
Kikaku, a younger disciple of Basho, proposed a slightly more dramatic, poem:
Yellow irises / a frog leaps in / the sound of water.
Sora’s Draft:
Another student, Kawai Sora, suggested a different perspective:
A frog jumps into the water / and makes / the sound of the water.
Basho’s Decision:
Basho rejected both and suggested the now-legendary first line about the “old pond” to provide a stark contrast of deep, ancient silence before the frog creates the sudden disturbance.
Yes, I discuss this account in Part III. The version of the anecdote I’m using has Kikaku proposing yamabuki ya (yellow kerria) rather than irises. As with many stories surrounding Bashō, the details seem to vary depending on the source. I wonder which kigo appears in the account you’re referring to, as irises are often summer kigo.
I do think Bashō was very intentional in his choices, and the story seems to support the idea that he was carefully shaping the conditions of the reader’s experience. At the same time, I suspect the centuries of meanings readers have found in furuike ya — some of which I will explore next week — go well beyond anything that could have been fully anticipated, which perhaps brings us back to Urszula’s original question. 😄
*yellow kerria
Wise and important thoughts. Thank you very much, Orense.
Thank you very much, Orense.
Urszula: I too think about the mazy area between poetry as communication and poetry as an inchoate spark for interpretation by individual readers. Haiku is particlarly mazy in that regard. For me, there’s an element of both. If the poet intended something, and that is not perceived by the reader, is that a communication failure? Yes. If a poet didn’t intend something, but the reader or readers has/have a revelation or epiphany of their own, is that a poetic success? Yes. There’s no one answer, I think.
“It never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.” — Ralph Vaughan Williams, quoted in Michael Kennedy: The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams. He reportedly said this regarding whether his Symphony No.6 was meant to be programmatic. I also recall (but cannot put my hand on the reference right now) that apropos The Lark Ascending, Vaughan Williams ruefully commented to a friend to the effect that, as soon as a work is released into the wild, it becomes at least as much the property of the performer and the listener as of the originator.
予が風雅は夏炉冬扇のごとし
yo ga fuuga wa karo toosen no gotoshi
“my elegant art
like a fireplace in summer
a fan in winter”
—Bashõ
Genjuu-an no ki, Bashoo ichidai-shuu (Nippon haisho taikei, Basho jidai, I (Tokyo, 1926, “Saimon no ji” p52, as cited by Makoto Ueda in Bashō and the Poetics of “Haiku,” Makoto Ueda, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Summer, 1963), pp. 423-431
Two-way communication between author and reader is an added value. A writer can, of course, write for themselves, and it would still be creative, if somewhat selfish.
Thank you very much, Keith.
Ah, but is it selfish, or considerate?… To inflict one’s poetry on the world, or spare it? Haiku may be something of an exception, to emphasise sharing, and (in its predominant tendency) to avoid the projection of ego and dazzle. But:
all poets agree
that their own poems
are poetry
That’s a very good question. On the other hand, if we don’t share, we’ll never know if our work made someone think or was just spam.
Maybe at least one person in the world felt like someone understood their experiences?
I agree that haiku is an exception and I am very glad that I learned about its existence, even though so late.
* Only once they have gone through a rigorous process of evaluation, editing, formatting, spellchecking and quality control.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that if aspects of a poem are not ‘received’ by the reader then there has been a failure of communication. Some of the poem may be ‘optional’ for the (real) reader, but one might hope that there are enough ‘goodies’ in there to make the experience enjoyable anyhow. The ‘true’ or ‘personal’ interpretation may be practically impenetrable. One could add an explanatory note, or turn it into a haibun, to explain it, but the haiku itself should be able to stand by itself on the basis of the words themselves.
I’ve been wondering about this too! It’s very challenging to discover a haiku’s original intention, especially with so many interpretations. I think a haiku might mean something else to each person and that’s the beauty of it all. Like there is no right or wrong.
Thank you, Martina.
I think you’re right that haiku often supports multiple meanings, and that this plurality is part of its strength. At the same time, I would be careful with the idea that there is no right or wrong at all. While interpretations can certainly diverge, they are still shaped and constrained by the poem itself.
We can see this quite simply in practice: one can, in principle, say that “old pond” is about aliens on planet Xandor, but most readers would not find that a convincing account of what is going on in the poem. That gap between possibility and plausibility is important. It suggests that interpretation is not free-floating, even if it remains open-ended.
Part of what makes “old pond” so enduringly interesting is precisely that tension: it seems open to many readings, yet not infinitely open to any reading whatsoever. Different interpretations can feel convincing for different reasons, and part of what the essay will explore over the next two weeks is what each of them might be responding to in the poem.
It is also useful, I think, to distinguish between personal associations a poem may generate for a reader and interpretations that can be meaningfully shared, discussed, and supported in relation to the text itself — perhaps that is what you are pointing towards.
A poem may be deeply meaningful to someone in a way that is not fully translatable into someone else’s experience, even if both are responding to the same text. That distinction between personal resonance and publicly shareable interpretation is an important one: the former belongs to lived experience, while the latter is what can be articulated, compared, and debated in relation to the poem itself. Both, and the tension between them, are part of the mystery and beauty of poetry, for me.
It’s fascinating how Bashō’s haikai verse is still being dissected. I remember owning a tape of Australian frog song, a lovely tape! Though water as its companion is an accompanying sound as if another musician.
water and frogs, frogs and water!
I loved the frogs that came out of our Queenslander toilet plumbing. Scared the bejeezers out of a visiting German guy, I had to carry them out. Lovely critters, and in an agrarian society a very common sight and sound of course.
So much to read regarding your notes, will have to buy some more time! (smiles)
Alan
Thank you, Alan — and the frog stories made me smile. :) The isolation point you raise lands close to home. Starting outside the established conversation seems to let people ask different questions, or ask the same ones without the weight of consensus already attached. Yanty’s anthology sounds like it came from exactly that kind of freedom, and I’m sorry to hear the circumstances that prompted it. We’ll have occasion to come to the topic of monoku at some point too — your examples are a good reminder of how much is being done in that form.
Fantastic!
Since 2012, when I realised I hadn’t written nearly enough monostich haiku, I’ve been researching, studying, reading, and writing them.
This is mostly very recently and not published/peer reviewed:
modŏ – new & selected
A collection of one-line haiku by Alan Summers (March 2026)
Book review: Modō by Alan Summers
SB WRIGHT 🇦🇺 (Sean Wright), Ditmar Awards award-winning writer (March 2026)
https://thesehaiku.substack.com/p/book-review-modo-by-alan-summers
There’s another one in development tentatively named:
the piano tuner’s assistant
I didn’t send in any proposals as I saw that you stated so many had already been sent in, and didn’t want to add to the load. (smiles)
I’m also working on a new version of Articulation of the Single Line Haiku
“The plus aliquid iterum edition”
Original published:
Articulation of the Single Line Haiku (original version) by Alan Summers
British Haiku Society journal Blithe Spirit vol.33 no.1 February 2023 ed. Iliyana Stoyanova
pages 49-62 (13 pages)
EXPANDED ESSAY:
A style-agnostic approach (The expanded edition)
The Pan Haiku Review inaugural issue ed. Alan Summers (May 2023)
pages 8-43 (35 pages)
Absorbing:
The Pull of the Single Poetic Line of Haiku (Alan Summers)
2021 Japan Writers Conference
It’s a fascinating approach to both creative writing and an EL take on Japanese haiku.
Thank you, Alan.
We’re always happy to receive suggestions and proposals. To keep editorial discussions separate from the comment thread, it would probably be best to send them through the submissions form.
A brief outline or more detailed proposal would be very welcome, and we’d be happy to take a look and discuss it further.
Great start!
We had something like this at Google+ haiku site The Haiku Nook. It was great to come to it from the main haiku arena and start afresh.
For the first ever anthology everything changed. We lost someone. Their family did not have the money to pay either the police or forensics to discover if it was murder or not.
By not getting involved with the ever powerful mainstream online haiku community we did things differently.
Out of the proceeds Yanty’s family could cover their financial bills and we could also donate to charity.
Yanty is still missed: https://area17.blogspot.com/2016/03/yantys-butterfly-anthology-of-haiku.html
You’ll notice that two of those poets went on to become managing editor (Jacob) and haiku editor (Nick) of Frogpond, and Nick is still haiku editor there amongst many other things.
We covered haiku written over one, or two, or three, or four lines, etc… in each category.
Here are some wonderful examples of monoku from the Yanty’s Butterfly anthology etc…
https://area17.blogspot.com/2016/12/travelling-single-line-of-haiku-one.html
It can be really healthy to start off in isolation, at first. (smiles)
a cold moon secrets of the gallows
Yanty Tjiam (1981–2015)
The word secrets is a noun, but it could also read, misread, or double-read as a verb, not just a noun (i.e. a cold moon secrets as in hides or stashes away something of the gallows? Cold moon makes this a winter season verse in traditional haiku.)
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snailish motion the grey clouds my heart
Fei Zhan
Yanty’s brother brings in a poetic line with snailish, (such a wonderful word), and it becomes an adjective with ‘snailish motion’ so that grey clouds move slowly, even sluggishly. Fei Zhan decides to imaginatively replace the oft used adjective sluggish.
Also, does something grey, that might be sad, cloud his heart too? Is clouds both a noun and a verb? There is more than one meaning and way of reading this poem.
.
rocking chairs just when the still of night
Lovette Carter
Lovette brings in an iconic image of the rocking chair, and disciplines herself to avoid the temptation to fill in the gaps between the words. Often we want to say and put as much if not everything into our haiku, and because it’s so short there’s an urge to jam more into the brief verse. Allow the haiku to breathe;it’s good to allow the reader to have fun with the white echoes that resonate out of the invisible text that sits both in-between and outside our black ink. The two words, ‘just when’ are expertly applied in-between ‘rocking chairs’ and ‘the still of the night.’ Surgical precision counts even more in one-line haiku than its regular counterpart of the three-line version.
Haiku from any approach of line number will tackle all kinds of issues, and topics. Haiku are traditionally linked to the seasons in general, rather than nature, as haiku came out as urbanization and the industrial revolution exploded in Japan. As more, and more urban landscapes appeared, so did issues of what became a modern society removed from its agricultural roots.
Now retired she has to worry about her daughter returning from medical emergencies.
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smiles in sunshine sociopath
Gabri Rigotti
The noticeable rise of the sociopath in films, TV, and certain business practices, has made us aware that there other models of human behavior out there. The smiles in the sunlight can be as deadly as a badly lit back alley. Of course there are good sociopaths and ‘sunshine sociopath’ is an interesting couple of words to take from the verse.
.
unfaithful lovers lying still
D Grover
Here we have the technique of making a word that has at least a double meaning/alternate meaning; there’s great sadness despite the playful pun of ‘lying’. See how the poem expands because there is not just one layer of meaning to be instantly got at, but at least a second layer of meaning, and both can direct us to memories of film, and TV or of friends or family who may have been unfaithful at least once, perhaps.
.
sunset in the slaughterhouse blood a color
Nicholas Klacsanzky
Nicholas worried that his poem might gross people out, but haiku can quickly take on issues around last century, and this century, because haiku came around at the close of the 19th century, when Shiki took aspects from the hokku verse of previous centuries, and made it a particular type that could take on difficult subjects. Out of the tens of thousands of haiku that Shiki wrote, he covered the topic of his dying from spinal tuberculosis directly and indirectly.
e.g.
雪の家に寢て居ると思ふばかりにて
original haiku by Shiki
yuki no ie ni nete iru to omou bakari ni te
Romanised (aka romaji) transcription: Atsuro Kagawa and Sachiko Iwabuchi
sick in bed I think of being sick in bed snowbound
English-language version by Alan Summers
Nicholas originally had a three line version, where he asked for feeback, which was a good strong draft version, but the preposition of ‘in’ was an issue regarding a line break…
e.g.
sunset
in the slaughterhouse–
blood is just a color
It could have easily moved to:
sunset
the slaughterhouse
blood is just a color
sunset
the slaughterhouse blood
is just a color
sunset
the slaughterhouse
blood is a color
But the linebreaks, the enjambment, wouldn’t quite work, so the one-line format worked perfectly as the enjambment is internal, with abruptive shifts, and a lesser need for correct syntax and grammar. In fact, when the preposition ‘in’ is a problem, it can become a strength of the one-line haiku. I’d say this has one of the many advantages that makes one-line haiku stand apart from a three-line haiku.
.
mountain without a name child gazing
Jacob Salzer
The poem went through a process of discussion, and revision in the Nook group; the friendly, yet insightful dynamics of a group that can fully trust each other brought us this stunning final version. I cannot begin to tell you how many different interpretations I get from this six-word line of poetry, with its gaps and spaces in between, and its white echoes where black ink text riffs, and expands because of the invisible text lying in-between, as well as underneath the spaces around the visible text.
We at first glance might see that there are two sections:
1. mountain without a name
2. child gazing
And:
1. mountain
2. without a name child gazing
And of course, a mountain has no name; it is, and needs no human appendage of an identity, and the same goes for a very young child. They are simply there, and need no names for each other.
Of course a three-line version could work with ‘without a name’ acting as a hinge/pivot line:
1. mountain
2. without a name
3. child gazing
mountain
without a name
without a name
child gazing
But something is lost, as if the spelling out for the reader reduces the tension, resonance, and multiple types of ways of reading this. It would still make for a fine haiku, but shifting it up a notch by making it a single line of poetry, it allows us to travel that single line, creating veloquality that the three-line haiku doesn’t have in so much abundance.
Edwin Lomere was the main collaborator in the critique, as was I, but hats off to Edwin, and Jacob himself, where Jacob was pushed to produce this tight piece of literature.
As with many of the Nook participants, it was incredibly difficult to select just one example of only one line haiku from them. Many more appear both in the anthology.
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full moon night the side we don`t show
Eva Limbach
Eva brings in the moon, a potent symbol across literature, and none so much as in haiku, and its earlier literary partners: the hokku, and renga/renku.
Here, Eva brings in psychological depth, with the fact that we are individuals, and a society, (or a part or section of society), and so we have other sides to our nature we might not choose to show in the daylight hours.
The use of ‘night’ is important even though we think of the moon as a nighttime presence. Is it a full moon, and night is the side we don’t show?
e.g.
night, the side we don`t show
The night is the side we don`t show
And breaking up the one line haiku so you can see this possible interpretation, and also highlight that gap where no text rests, at least in visible ink:
full moon night the side we don`t show
Or is it just one of those spine-tingling full moon nights, where the moon dominates the night sky, over the stars, amidst the scurrying of smaller lifeforms?
Two words that power this haiku are ‘night’ and ‘don’t’, both expertly inserted.
Haiku requires a skill to make sure a word pulls more than the weight of its surface meaning, and more than the letters it contains.
.
And many more examples.
They don’t possibly look groundbreaking now, but they were fresh and new at the time.
And even possibly influencing some published haiku since 2016.
Brilliant!
Bashõ was, and remains, revolutionary. Some, like Robert D. Wilson in the latter days of “Simply Haiku,” might conceivably argue that he remains revolutionary only because haiku has gone backwards since Bashõ! A trenchant view which is amusing, and there may be something in it, but it is unfair to others who followed. Buson, Issa, and Shiki were also “revolutionary,” among others. Today’s revolutionaries: take courage!
Orense asks where we enter with “old pond.” For me, it was the ambivalent ‘half-cut’ and the insight of synaesthesia that opened my eyes on this poem. The rest followed —and Orense deals with ‘the rest’ in her next posts. As far as concerns synaesthesia, this verse has a cross-sensory aspect in that disturbing the stillness of the “old pond” we have vision/light-or-its-absence, and audition/sound-and-its-absence. The frog leaps into the sound (and then both disappear).
Although the full flowering of sensory transference, or sensory fusion, or the later term synaesthesia, is usually attributed to Bashō, it was the subject of experiment in classic haiku by others before or around the same time:
shigure kiku / nioi wa ume no / saki-gake ya
hearing winter rain / the scent of plum blossoms / leads the way!
—Teitoku, early 1600s. A fusion of hearing and olfaction, the rain that is heard accentuates the scent of the blossom.
yūgao ya / koe ni tsutsumare / yoru no kaze
moonflower— / veiled in the voice / (of) the night wind.
—Sōin , around 1670s.
And at roughly the same time:
ame no oto / yoru no shita ni / yuki no iro
sound of rain / beneath the night— / the color of snow
—Saikaku ca. 1670s:
Bashō too experimented with cross-senses in early work, for example:
furu oto ya / mimi mo sū-naru / ume no ame
—Bashō, spring of 1666.
Reichhold gives this literally as “falling sound – / ear also sour become / plum rain.” However, I have niggling doubts: “ume no ame” is an early spring kigo reflecting the time when plums bloom rather than when they are as yet green and sour on the tree, if I recall correctly. The kigo for sour or green plums is ao-ume 青梅. The central part, according to language references, is more like “ears also absorb” or “the ear too becomes quiet”. Although this verse is said to be suggestive of synaesthesia, it may not seem a sure-fire example.
Two seminal verses by Bashō deploying full-fledged sensory fusion were published at about the same time. In the winter of 1684-85, umi kure te / kamo no koe / honoka ni shiroshi: literally “sea darken / duck ’s voice / faintly white” was published in the Journal of Bleached Bones in a Field (note: Reichhold places the duck poem in 1681 but other sources have it as 1684-5). And ‘old pond,’ which in the spring of 1686 placed top in the Kawazu Awase (frog contest) in Edo (cf. Barnhill and other sources). It appeared in Haru no Hi (“Spring Day”), one of the seven haikai anthologies (Haikai Shichibushu) compiled by Bashō’s circle, edited by Kakei Yamamoto, and published in 1686. It made quite a splash in the pond of old haiku.
In recent years of anglophone haiku, some poets on ‘discovering’ synaesthesia have often beaten it to death, shoe-horning it into many of their verses wherever possible. Simply to write a verse incorporating sensory crossover is no longer by itself sufficient to qualify as “insight,” in my view. Unless exceptionally profound and original, there must be something more.
Looking forward to the views of others on this first part of “old pond.”
—————-
The various English translations of ‘old pond’ have spawned hundreds of take-offs or honkadori, as per the honoured tradition of referencing earlier literary works, particularly in English language haiku where it is often the butt of humour. Sacrilege! One of my favourites in this irreverent genre (a three-part verse that can also be seen as consecutive, a narrative, another supposed no-no) appeared in Mike Rehling’s Failed Haiku #70:
old pond
nine iron
sound of water
—Ann Smith
Thank you, Keith, you are too kind.
I’ve always found it strange that synesthesia gets a free pass in ELH when other figures of speech don’t. I see it like any rhetorical device in haiku: high risk, high reward. Aligned with the moment’s truth, it’s powerful; merely decorative, it can sink a poem. I do think it tends to be overused — but used well, as in your examples, I love it, and the precedents you’ve traced push the history back further than I’d mapped. We should come back to synesthesia and look closely at some of its better uses at some point.
Love Ann Smith’s nine iron take :)