Moon and Finger 20 – Simile Part 4
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.
Simile and the Mechanics of Ma
Part IV: The Pointing Finger
When we left simile, in the third part of this series, the humble like had recovered some of its good name. We saw that it can buffer perception against premature fusion (Part I), mark the boundary between the seen and the imagined with a precision no other device can offer (Part II), and carry situated, subjective experience into the poem without turning it into confession (Part III). We saw, in short, that the suspicion against simile in English-language haiku rests on a misreading of what the device is and does. Simile is not a diluted metaphor, nor a poetic statement awaiting the reader’s agreement, but an instrument with its own powers. And it may be rarer in haiku, we began to suspect, for interesting reasons rather than disqualifying ones.
Those interesting reasons are this part’s subject. But first, a more basic question must be answered, one that has been waiting beneath the whole series: what kind of act is a comparison? When a poet says that one thing is like another, what is the marker doing in the mouth and in the mind?
The answer begins in an unexpected place: not in poetics, where simile has garnered less attention than metaphor, but in linguistics. In “The Deictic Identification of Similarity” (2017), the linguist Ekkehard König examines how languages express resemblance and identifies a recurring pathway by which expressions of manner, quality and degree develop into markers of similarity. Expressions meaning “in this way,” “thus,” or “to this extent” can become grammaticalised as comparative markers over time. Such expressions are deictic, meaning they point, directing attention from a particular position towards something in the world. “This way” and “that way,” for instance, do not simply describe a manner; they indicate one, as if the speaker were pointing a finger, and König notes that such demonstratives establish a joint focus of attention between speaker and addressee. What is striking is how widely the pathway recurs. König reports it in Germanic, Romance, Finnish, Polynesian, African and Asian languages, where the same pointing forms develop into comparatives, quotatives and other markers of resemblance. I don’t take this to mean that all similative markers share one origin, which König does not claim. But a pathway that appears again and again in unrelated languages may suggest a deeper link between comparison and the act of pointing, between directing attention towards something and inviting someone to perceive one thing through another.
This matters for our exploration because it offers a way of thinking about what a simile does. A simile does not simply assert that two things are similar. It directs attention towards a resemblance from a particular angle, in a particular respect. It says, in effect: look here; look at it this way. Its terms remain distinct, but the marker guides us across the distance between them. And this is where simile’s dynamism begins. The pointing gesture may not be a mere metaphor for what simile does. The linguistic history of some comparative markers suggests that pointing and comparison have a deeper affinity. And there is something primitive in that, in the best sense of the word. Pointing is among the earliest communicative acts a human being performs, and König notes that demonstratives appear very early in language acquisition; a child points before it can name, and anyone who has stood before a landscape with a companion knows the power a pointing finger holds.
This brings us to the distinction between simile and metaphor. Using the familiar shorthand we can say that metaphor tells while simile shows. There is something of Adam in metaphor, the primal conferring of names, and there are experiences that only identification can deliver. Literatures from the Psalms to surrealism are built on its power. Simile offers something different: it carries the witness’s position, the angle from which one thing comes into view through another. Its apparent simplicity, which has led critics to dismiss it as common, crude or a beginner’s tool, may be less a defect than a sign of its nearness to one of our oldest ways of sharing experience. The finger pointing at the moon is not an image of the device’s failure. It is a portrait of its particular power. And, as we shall see, that power is not incompatible with haiku. It fits the form’s frame in ways we have only begun to explore.
1. The Wind Beneath the Kite
If a simile directs attention from one thing to another, it is itself a kind of movement, and it is movement that our first example by Aruga Jue puts before us.
尾の切れし凧のごとくに二月終ふ
o no kireshi tako no gotoku ni nigatsu ou
like a kite
with the tail cut off —
end of February
The simile presents its vehicle first — the tailless kite — before revealing its tenor. In Japanese poetry, and especially in haiku, it is very common for the image to appear before the thing it qualifies. Japanese syntax often places the main subject late, or leaves it unstated altogether, which allows the poem to suspend meaning and delay closure. With simile this can be especially powerful: it allows the comparison to radiate outward across multiple possible targets. In haiku, where so much depends on timing, suspension, and the management of ma, postponing the referent is one of the form’s most effective techniques.
Here, by presenting the vehicle first — “like a tailless kite” — the poem lets the reader inhabit the image before knowing exactly what it applies to, and creates a brief suspension in which the kite exists alone in the reader’s mind before February arrives to complete it. That suspension, the interval between the comparison and its object, is itself a form of ma. The reader inhabits the image of instability and drift before discovering what it is measuring. The qualities accumulate provisionally: drift, imbalance, incompleteness, erratic movement. When “end of February” finally appears, it does not simply receive those qualities in a neat one-to-one way. Instead, it enters an already charged field of feeling.
What the simile is measuring is the distance between expectation and reality. As a kigo, the kite belongs to spring celebration — it should be flying, purposeful, tethered, part of the season’s opening joy. The tail is what steadies it; without it, the kite wobbles, pulled unpredictably by the wind. The end of February is also the moment the month should be turning decisively toward spring. The simile performs on both the same operation the image describes. The kite loses its tail; the kigo loses its conventional resonance, cut to the size of actual experience. Both are left drifting, stripped of their usual directional force. By presenting this image of failed purposefulness before naming February, the poem establishes the distance between what the season should be and what it is, and then applies it to sky and calendar both. February should be turning decisively toward spring. Instead it drifts.
Because the target of the comparison is not fully specified, the simile remains open and mobile in a way that compounds this effect. We know that end of February is being compared to the tailless kite, but the poem never tells us exactly which dimension of February is at stake. Is it the season’s instability? The poet’s experience of it? This particular February, or all Februaries? The transitional quality of early spring, or the abruptness of the month’s truncation? The answer is all of these simultaneously, and the simile’s power comes precisely from refusing to specify.
There is also something structurally appropriate in the simile’s role here, almost to the point of iconicity. The partly untethered vehicle behaves like the kite. A poem about lost steering withholds its own steering — the referent — and so enacts its subject twice. And indeed the distance between expectation and reality cannot be honestly rendered by a technique that collapses distance. Metaphor and juxtaposition would not work as well:
a kite with
the tail cut off —
end of February
The reader will likely notice that both share the feature of being cut, and will inevitably form some relation between them: perhaps a resonance within the scene, perhaps a comparison, perhaps even an identity in which February becomes the kite. On this point the version with juxtaposition does not fail. Yet it is static, fixed, much less alive than the original version containing simile.
This suggests something kinetic, processual, that simile can bring. The simile here is not merely shaping the interval between images but animating it — keeping the ma dynamically open, still generating rather than merely containing. The simile keeps the comparison in motion, preventing it from settling.
But some may object that it is the delayed structure that is creating this kinetic effect, this animation of the interval, rather than the simile alone. And it just so happens that the next poem has all the conditions allowing us to test this hypothesis.
2. Sketching the Season
六月が牛のごとくに横たはる
rokugatsu ga ushi no gotoku ni yokotawaru
the sixth month
lies down just like
a cow
Here no such delay operates, and the dynamic quality survives. June lying down just like a cow has an almost immediate physical impact and comprehensibility: heavy, slow, warm, expansive. It suggests largeness at rest, stillness, something settled into the landscape with complete indifference to anything beyond its own weight. There is also something seasonal in the comparison. A cow lying down evokes long grass, heat, fields, the fullness of early summer. The simile gives June not only a visual form but a tempo: the particular quality of time of the season, when days are long and movement becomes an effort.
Consider the bare juxtaposition:
sixth month — a cow lies down
The connection is available. The reader will sense the heaviness, the slowness, perhaps the seasonal resonance. The poem does not entirely fail. But it is static in a way the original is not. What is lost is not the comparison but the specific quality of motion the simile carries: the particular way a large body folds under its own weight, the specific act of going down that reveals what June essentially is in these long days. Juxtaposition can suggest that June resembles a cow; it cannot borrow precisely this one kinetic quality, this way of being, and apply it to the month with the specificity gotoku achieves.
Two potential objections sharpen rather than undermine the argument.
The first concerns personification and how it might interfere with assessing the simile’s effect. If lies down already animates June, which it does, regardless of whether a simile is present, then perhaps it is the personification rather than the simile that is generating the kinetic effect. But I think this misidentifies what lies down is doing. It is not an independent animation of June. It is the grammatical scaffold on which the simile is erected, a functional staging that exists to allow the comparison to attach to its tenor. The poet is not trying to identify June with a cow, but to make the manner of the cow’s action the manner through which we apprehend June. If we paraphrase, “June arrives and settles in the way a cow lies down,” the personification dissolves into transparency. What remains is not June given animal qualities, but June’s quality of motion specified through the comparison. The lies down is not an independent poetic effect. It is the mechanism by which the simile’s effect becomes possible.
This is confirmed by what happens when the personification is retained but the simile removed:
the sixth month
lies down —
a cow
Putting the awkwardness aside, we can still assess what remains. The animation is still there, and yet something essential has gone. The relation between the lying-down month and the cow is now unspecified. The reader must construct it without guidance, and what they construct is more likely to be a static identification than a living comparison. The simile is not responsible for all the animation, but it directs us towards the particular manner of movement that the poem makes its own.
The second objection is more searching. One can, after all, juxtapose manner:
sixth month —
the way a cow
lies down
This version invokes a quality of motion without an explicit simile marker. It is the closest thing juxtaposition can produce to an implied simile, and it is closer to the original than the bare version. But something is still missing. The way a cow lies down presents a manner; just like a cow makes the comparison itself the means by which we apprehend June. It points towards a particular way of being, from here, now, in this specific act of comparison, with the slight note of precision and surprise that simile carries. In haiku, where the management of attention is everything, that is the difference between a description and a gesture.
The simile is not comparing June and cow as static entities. It is comparing the way June occupies time and the way a cow occupies space. Through gotoku, these two modes of being are brought into relation, and we undergo a movement of apprehension from one to the other. The comparison does not simply attach the cow’s qualities to June; it directs us towards a particular quality of June’s unfolding, its heavy, unhurried settling into the season. That relation is alive in a way that juxtaposition, however close it comes, can only approximate.
3. Tipping the Hourglass
Shiki offers a particularly revealing example of how simile can direct attention beyond resemblance towards a manner of being. In his essay “Clouds” (Kumo) he writes:
Spring clouds are like cotton, summer clouds like rocks, autumn clouds like sand, winter clouds like lead. Morning clouds flow, midday clouds billow up, evening clouds burn.
The comparisons are deceptively simple. Shiki seems to be classifying clouds according to their appearance, but the materials do more than describe shapes or textures. They give the clouds a body, and through that body the seasons acquire a character. Cotton suggests the softness and lightness of spring; rocks, the weight and fullness of summer; sand, the fine-grained dispersal of autumn; lead, the density and cold heaviness of winter. The autumn comparison is especially suggestive. Sand can accumulate, but it can also scatter and slip away, grain by grain. It is material that can be gathered yet is difficult to hold. Shiki’s haiku takes up this comparison and sets it in motion:
砂の如き雲流れ行く朝の秋
suna no gotoki kumo nagareyuku asa no aki
clouds flow like sand
an autumn morning
Here the verb nagareyuku, to flow onward or away, does more than describe the clouds’ movement. The simile marked by no gotoki directs us to apprehend that movement through the manner in which sand flows. The comparison may recall the fine, scattered clouds associated with autumn, such as mackerel clouds. The clouds are not simply a mass drifting across the sky; they seem to stream as countless small particles, their separate movements gathering into a larger flow. The season’s character emerges through the movement of the clouds, and the clouds become the means through which we experience it.
Nakagawa Mie reads Shiki’s unusual phrase asa no aki (“morning’s autumn”), rather than the more usual aki no asa (“autumn morning”), as a way of focusing on the particular sensation of autumn as experienced in the morning. In the great expanse of sky, the sand-like clouds flowing onward allow the poet to feel autumn with his whole being. I think the appearance of simile in this poem is illuminated by this focus on feeling. Shiki himself shows us that it is not forbidden in haiku to feel and to show feeling, and that simile can participate in this.
Nakagawa also quotes the critic Yamamoto Kenkichi, who characterises the poem as shasei, capturing an invigorating autumn landscape through a distinctive poetic sensibility. (I feel this shows how narrow the conception of shasei is in ELH compared to its native tradition.)
The comparison can also open out into a larger imaginative space. Sand flowing may evoke an hourglass, and with it the passage of time, the sense of something slipping beyond our grasp. For a reader familiar with Japanese dry landscape gardens, another possibility presents itself: sand or gravel arranged to suggest flowing water — the sky a Zen garden with the clouds raked into flowing shapes, the above mirroring the below. Neither association needs to be a deliberate allusion by Shiki to be available to the reader. The simile makes these ways of seeing possible without requiring us to choose among them.
What matters is that the comparison does not stop at a likeness between clouds and sand. It directs us towards a manner of movement, and that movement can generate a larger image in which the immediate scene acquires further dimensions. The hourglass, the passing of time, the dry garden: these are not meanings simply attached to the two terms. They emerge from the relation the simile sets in motion.
4. Setting Stillness in Motion
But the dynamism of simile does not depend on visible movement. Sometimes it changes our apprehension of stillness itself. Consider this haiku by Iida Ryūta 飯田龍太:
眠る嬰児水あげてゐる薔薇のごとし
nemuru ēji mizu akete iru bara no gotoshi
like a cut rose
drawing up water —
a sleeping newborn
Iida Ryuta Tr. Michael Dylan Welch and Emiko Miyashita
The rose arrives with a familiar poetic history: beauty, colour, fragrance, delicacy. These associations are available to the reader, and they lend the comparison some of its initial resonance. But they are echoes rather than its heart. The infant is not simply being likened to a flower for its beauty, nor is the rose merely a decorative image of youthfulness. The comparison directs us towards the rose’s activity, its quiet work of drawing water.
There is something forceful, almost effortful, in the deep sleep of an infant. The child appears utterly still, yet that stillness seems to contain an intensity of its own: the bodily absorption of a life growing and developing, without conscious intention or awareness. The rose offers a way of apprehending this otherwise difficult-to-articulate quality. Its activity is largely invisible, but sustained. Through the comparison, the infant’s sleep becomes more than rest. We sense a life wholly engaged in the work of living.
Yet the poem’s simile may do more than direct our attention towards the infant’s vitality. It may also reveal something of the poet’s response to the child. One can hardly remain neutral before a sleeping infant. There is an almost excessive tenderness in the impulse to find an image adequate to the child’s appeal, a kind of affectionate exaggeration that ordinary description might struggle to contain. The rose is not simply an object that resembles the infant; it is the image through which the poet’s feeling becomes perceptible. As in the examples discussed in the previous part of this series, subjectivity enters the poem not as confession but through the particular way the world is apprehended.
The comparison is particularly open and rich in intricate ways. It may also evoke an infant suckling in sleep. The rose draws water to sustain itself; the infant, too, may be engaged in an act of nourishment without conscious awareness. And the rose’s condition may deepen the resonance further. A cut rose can continue to draw water, and a cutting can even take root and develop into a new plant. The newborn, too, has undergone a separation, the cutting of the umbilical cord marking a transition from one mode of nourishment to another. The poem does not state these parallels, and we need not assume they were all intended. They remain possible associations among others, available without becoming the poem’s definitive meaning.
And the poem’s irregular 6-7-6 rhythm may also be significant. Its slight excess over the conventional 5-7-5 measure seems fitting for a poem so full of life. The additional on might be heard as a kind of overfullness, an overflow of vitality or affection that the poem’s quiet scene can barely contain.
And perhaps the relation works in the other direction, too. The rose draws water to sustain itself; the poet, in a manner of speaking, draws in the infant’s overwhelming appeal. The comparison becomes an act of attention that is also an act of taking in. This is only a possibility, not a meaning we need to attribute to the poet consciously. But it suggests how the simile can implicate the observer in the relation it establishes: the infant’s vitality, the rose’s activity and the poet’s affection become available to one another through the comparison.
Conclusion
This brings us back to the question of simile’s place in haiku. The device is sometimes treated as incompatible with the form, too explanatory or too insistent, an intrusion of the poet’s interpretative voice into a poetry of direct presentation. But perhaps simile is, in a sense, too compatible with the haiku frame. Haiku already does so much of the work of situating perception through its brevity, its seasonal references, its cuts and juxtapositions, that simile’s particular contribution may often be unnecessary. The frame itself can establish the relation between a fleeting experience and the world in which it occurs. This may help explain why simile is relatively infrequent in English-language haiku, without making it irrelevant. When the occasion calls for it, simile can still do things the frame alone cannot.
It is worth noticing, too, that the examples considered here share a theme. The end of February, the reclining month of June, clouds flowing across an autumn sky, an infant absorbed in sleep: all involve temporal movement, whether the passage of a season, the unfolding of a moment or the ongoing work of life. These are difficult things to sketch. They cannot be captured simply by recording a visible surface, because what matters is not only what something looks like but how it passes, persists or unfolds. Simile offers a way to make such movements perceptible by giving them a manner, a body or an analogue in the world.
For the comparisons we have examined do not stop at surface resemblance. A kite with its tail cut off offers more than an image of instability; it gives the end of February a precarious manner of passing. The cow’s weighted descent gives a sense of the feeling of summer’s arrival. Sand flowing through the sky becomes more than a description of clouds; it opens onto the movement of a season, and perhaps onto other ways of imagining time and landscape. A rose drawing water does more than lend an infant the familiar attributes of a flower; it makes a quiet, otherwise imperceptible vitality available to us. In each case, the comparison takes us beyond a static inventory of shared qualities towards a way of being in time.
This is where simile touches something fundamental to haiku. The moment is never simply a collection of properties. It is an encounter between a world in flux and a perception situated within it, a meeting in which things disclose themselves in particular ways and for a particular time. The comparison can illuminate that encounter without fixing its meaning once and for all. It makes an essence perceptible while leaving it mutable, dependent on the relation through which it comes into view. What a thing is cannot always be separated from how it appears, how it moves, or how it is apprehended here and now.
This is not to say that other poetic devices cannot achieve comparable effects. Metaphor and juxtaposition, too, can disclose movement, transform perception and bring unexpected dimensions of experience into view. But simile has a particular means of doing so. Its marker makes the act of comparison explicit, taking us through the terms in an act of apprehension that we undergo rather than merely recognise. As we move from one term to the other, we are directed towards how something is: how it moves, persists, appears or unfolds.
What these poems begin to reveal is not simply that simile can be made to work in haiku, but that it can do things of extraordinary subtlety. By directing attention towards a manner of being or unfolding, it can make the fleeting perceptible without arresting it, give a moment depth without explaining it away, and disclose something in an object that neither description nor juxtaposition alone might bring into view. Through its pointing it can illuminate the situated and mutable nature of perception itself: how things become available to us not as fixed collections of qualities, but through the particular relations in which we encounter them. Simile is on the way and in the ways: on the way, in the relation it sets in motion between distinct terms; in the ways, in the particular manner of being or unfolding towards which it directs our attention. The phrase holds together the two dimensions of its power, the movement between things and the movement we discover within them.
In the next part, we will leave the question of simile’s place in haiku behind. Instead, we will look at what happens when poets make full use of its possibilities: the aesthetic force it can exert, and the exceptional poetic achievements that become possible when comparison becomes more than comparison.
Orense Nicod
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.
TAKE SIMILE 1 POLL if you haven’t already.
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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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