Moon and Finger 3 – When the Pond Jumps into the Frog
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
Part II Crossing
Last week in Part I we identified how the frog and the pond enact fūeki and ryūkō, and traced the poem’s geometry—horizontality and verticality—meeting at the moment of the splash. What we did not yet have was a name for what happens between them at the instant of contact.
The frog jumps in. Something else jumps back.
This week we turn to how different readings have entered that moment, and whether any of them can fully name it.
This essay stems from my experience of reading “old pond”. Each time I read the poem, I arrive at an interpretation that feels discovered rather than constructed, yet each return makes that interpretation feel insufficient. What first appears stable gradually gives way to further instability, as if the poem resists being finally settled.
Not every reader will experience the poem this way. But the range and persistence of its interpretive history suggest that this instability is not merely personal. Across centuries, readers have repeatedly returned to the poem, offering accounts that illuminate something real in its effect while leaving something else unresolved.
The movement of this essay follows those unresolved elements. Instead of stacking interpretations, it moves from one framework to another because each leaves something behind that the next must take up again. What emerges is not a sequence of competing readings, but a slow shift in the level at which the poem has to be understood. Each approach changes the question: from what the poem means, to how it works, to how it is experienced, and finally toward the conditions that make such experiences possible in the first place.
4. What Jumps Back
The most influential lens through which old pond has been read is Zen Buddhism. Zen-inflected readings tend to treat the moment of the splash as a glimpse of nonduality — the sense that frog and pond were never really two separate things to begin with. The poem is not read as one thing acting on another, but as a single event in which subject and object stop being distinct. The frog does not simply act upon the pond as an outside force, nor does the pond simply receive that action; both appear together, inside the same occurrence. This moment is sometimes associated with satori — a sudden awakening or insight in which ordinary distinctions fall away. The sound of water, in this reading, is not something that happens after the frog jumps in. It is what that collapse of distinction sounds like — the instant when categories stop shaping what is felt, and the whole scene is experienced as one.
These readings are compelling because they capture something real about the poem: the half-cut between frog and sound does not behave like an ordinary sequence of events, and perception itself seems to shift at the moment of the splash. The pond is not just a backdrop, and the frog is not just an outsider breaking into the scene; both are felt as parts of one single occurrence. But while this sense of inseparability is powerful, it also tends to settle into a picture of resolution that doesn’t quite account for other features of the poem.
Zen readings emphasise immediacy — the collapse of distinction into direct apprehension — but they tend to underplay the symbolic and formal mediation through which that immediacy is produced. The poem’s effect depends not only on perception but on structure: on the historical weight of furuike, the hon’i of kawazu, and the deliberate openness of mizu no oto. If experience were simply given without mediation, the specificity of these choices would become unnecessary.
Old pond is therefore not a neutral opening. Unlike “green pond” or “spring pond,” it does not merely describe a seasonal scene. It immediately introduces accumulated time and symbolic weight. The “oldness” of the pond is not decorative; it is structurally active, shaping the vertical axis of depth and duration against which the suddenness of the splash can register at all.
At the same time, mizu no oto introduces abstraction precisely at the point where Zen-inflected readings would expect immediacy. Where an onomatopoeic rendering might have produced direct sonic imitation — a more continuous fusion of sound and event — Bashō instead chooses a minimal, nominal formulation: “the sound of water.” This move withholds acoustic immediacy and replaces it with a mediated designation, as if sound were being named at the very moment it might otherwise dissolve into pure presence.
Another pressure point is that the poem’s terms are not fixed. Depending on the reading, the frog and pond may stand as any number of paired concepts: self and world, mind and reality, the ever-changing and the unchanging, innovation and tradition, or simply frog and pond. Yet whatever names are given to them, the poem does not merely bring them together. At the moment of contact, something happens to them. The poem does not simply present a moment of inseparability. It also presents a movement.
The poem doesn’t just create a gap — it engineers a collision. At the moment the frog enters the pond the axes exchange, the poem’s two halves swap places.
The frog — which arrived as ryūkō, as horizontal event, as the individual intervention moving through space and time — enters the pond and becomes vertical. It disappears downward into depth. It is absorbed into the paradigmatic. It ceases to be a horizontal event and becomes part of what the pond contains.
Simultaneously the pond — which sat as fūeki, as vertical accumulation, as the unchanging ground — is forced horizontal. It speaks. It sounds. It moves outward in time through ripple and splash.
The same transformation can be seen from either side: the frog becomes depth; the pond becomes sound. The unchanging is made to move, and the moving is made to still. Tradition becomes event, and event becomes tradition.
If the splash were only a moment of unity, these shifts would be incidental. But the poem gives them a precise directional logic: what appears on one side of the cut reappears on the other in inverted form.
The contact does not merely erase the distinction between frog and pond.
It redistributes it by changing the position of each.
Some readings of the poem have interpreted this exchange through the yin–yang structure of Chinese philosophy, in which each principle contains and transforms the other. Yin is not simply the opposite of yang but includes it within itself, just as yang includes yin; what defines each term is not separation but reversible interpenetration. Read through this lens, the poem’s own categories can be aligned with that structure: pond/fūeki corresponds to yin, frog/ryūkō to yang. The passive accumulation of the pond is activated and made expressive by the intervention of the frog — the unchanging contains the changing. Conversely, the frog’s action is immediately absorbed into the field it enters, its movement becoming part of what was already there — the changing contains the unchanging.
The poem presents a problem that none of its readings can quite avoid. Frog and pond meet, and something happens to the distance between them. Nonduality and the yin–yang model are often placed in proximity, but they do not describe the same kind of relation and provide different answers to this question.
Nonduality answers by denying the premise. The “two” was never as solid as it seemed; what looks like a separation falling away is the recognition that it was never fully established. Frog and pond do not become one. They were never, in the deepest sense, two.
Yin–yang answers differently. The two terms are not dissolved, but defined through reversible relation: each contains the possibility of the other, and each becomes intelligible only through that transformation. The pond’s stillness can turn to sound. The frog’s motion can settle into depth. Their relation is not static but continuously generative, producing each term through the other.
Read together, the two traditions mark different thresholds of the same encounter. And the poem does not choose between these thresholds: it passes through both. At the instant of contact, the distinction itself falls away: this is the moment nonduality names. But the instant cannot be held, and what follows is not silence but exchange: the frog absorbed into depth, the pond forced into sound, each term passing into the position of the other without settling. This is the moment yin–yang names.
Yet what neither account fully captures is the relation between these two moments — the fact that collapse and exchange are not separate stages, but appear to generate one another within the same movement. Nonduality isolates the disappearance of distinction; yin–yang describes its reversible return. What remains unaccounted for is the structure that allows both to occur without contradiction.
The visual form of yin–yang, the taijitu, already contains the logic of the structure that can hold both.
That structure is a chiasm in which dissolution opens directly into reversible exchange. The name comes from the Greek letter chi (Χ), whose intersecting lines give it its visual form. In rhetoric, chiasmus is the simple inversion ABBA, but in its deeper sense a chiasm names a crossing in which terms exchange positions and remain dynamically reversible.
The chiasm is not itself a resolution. When the terms exchange they do not arrive at a new stable configuration — they open a new gap. The frog absorbed into vertical depth and the pond forced into horizontal sound are not a completed picture. They are two terms in a renewed tension, a relational field generated by the crossing of the last one. The structure does not close. It recurses.
Once this chiastic logic is identified, taking in the larger picture, a new pattern emerges: the poem’s structure does not stop at a single gap. It generates further relations within itself, each operating on the same principle.
At the largest scale, the kireji establishes the primary field: old pond on one side, and frog / sound of water on the other. Meaning lives in the tension between them rather than in either term.
Within the second part, a smaller field appears: frog, then sound of water. Here again the relation is not given but must be constructed by the reader — sequential, causal, or fused — reproducing the structure of the whole in miniature.
At the moment of contact, the relation does not settle but reverses: frog and water exchange positions in the act of interpretation, producing not resolution but a new instability. What seemed like a single crossing becomes the condition for another.
A further field opens beneath the first three, at the level of composition itself. The frog, too, carries fūeki. Kawazu is the classical, archaic word — not kaeru, the ordinary term — and it arrives already saturated with centuries of poetic convention, its hon’i accumulated and waiting: the reservoir/pond of tradition compressed into a single ancient kigo. Read this way, the frog does not act on tradition from outside. The frog is tradition, carried into the scene as a word already heavy with inherited association. And the pond, in turn, becomes the ryūkō. Furuike ya was not the expected opening for this kigo — old pond was never the season word’s accustomed setting — and choosing it was itself the individual intervention, the poetically unprecedented move that disturbs kawazu‘s hon’i rather than honoring it. What looks like the unchanging ground is, at the level of poetic choice, the disruption. Fūeki and ryūkō, then, are not fixed properties of frog and pond. What presented itself as yin was already yang. The mapping reverses again here, beneath the level already mapped.
And there is a final structural observation that gathers the whole poem into a single movement. The kireji establishes the largest division: old pond on one side, and on the other frog / sound of water. But within the second part, the direction reverses. First comes the frog, then the sound. The internal sequence mirrors and inverts the outer one. What begins as pond → gap → frog becomes frog → gap → pond. The poem is therefore not only structured by a cut, but by a reversal across that cut.
The result is that the poem’s largest structure and its smallest movement reflect one another. The outer architecture and the inner sequence are not separate levels but inversions of the same relation.
And this is mirrored even in sound. The phonetic echoes identified in Part I produce a chiastic effect. The to that opens tobikomu returns at the end of oto. Between them, mu and mi fall on either side of the gap — TObikoMU MIzu no oTO — creating a soft inversion across the poem’s hinge. The effect is not strict symmetry, but a felt crossing: the sense that sound turns back on itself at the moment of contact.
What begins to emerge is not a series of separate readings layered on top of one another, but a single structural principle repeating at different scales. The same movement that separates old pond from frog and sound is repeated within the frog and the sound themselves, and again within the moment of contact, where positions reverse rather than resolve. Even the categories used to interpret the poem — nature and mind, change and permanence, event and ground — are not stable frameworks but further instances of the same reversible cut. Each level reproduces the same logic: a division that immediately turns back on itself, generating a new relation inside what looked like a fixed opposition. The poem does not therefore move from unity to multiplicity or from opposition to synthesis. It generates nested fields of relation, each one opening inside the last, each one governed by the same exchange.
I want to be clear about what is being claimed here. I am not claiming the nested fields I have described are phenomenologically available as explicit structures. Nobody reads old pond and consciously thinks: “Ah, now I am encountering the third level of a recursively nested chiastic relation”. What is available, instead, is the effect of those reversals. What the reader might experience is the sense that the poem won’t quite stop moving, a resistance to settling, an unusual density or depth, or a continued oscillation between possible readings. What is encountered, then, is not structure as such, but structural instability — a sense that the relation between frog, pond, and sound remains active, continually reconfiguring itself without arriving at rest. The depth of the poem is not given as an object of analysis, but as a felt resistance to closure.
The structure does not stop at exchange. As the crossings accumulate, the terms become increasingly difficult to separate from one another. What appeared as frog is already pond; what appeared as pond is already frog. At this edge of reversibility, another framework already present within Bashō’s cultural horizon names a formulation that begins to sound less like commentary than recognition.
5. Emptiness is Form
The Heart Sutra of Mahāyāna Buddhism contains one of the most famous chiasms in history: form is emptiness, emptiness is form. As a foundational text of the Zen tradition it would have been entirely familiar to Bashō, who studied Zen seriously in his later years.
The arrival of this framework is not a claim that Bashō set out to illustrate the Heart Sutra, consciously building the poem around its formula. He may have. It is impossible to know, and the argument does not require it. What is more likely, given a lifetime of Zen practice and daily exposure to a text chanted as routinely as the Heart Sutra is in Zen monasteries, is something less deliberate: that its logic had become a habit of thought, a way of perceiving relation that shaped his sense of form without his needing to invoke it by name. The chiasm in the poem may not be an illustration of the sutra. It may simply be what a mind trained by it produces, even unprompted.
The parallels are, regardless of intent, striking. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form — eight syllables turning on a reversible structure already traced in the previous section: two terms exchange position, each requiring the other to be what it is. The frog is the pond; the pond is the frog. The sutra and the poem are not making the same argument. They are performing the same shape.
Emptiness is form: the pond, weighted with prior stillness, is brought into appearance by the frog’s entry. Form is emptiness: the frog’s action, its sound, is immediately absorbed back into the field that receives it.
The Heart Sutra’s formulation is not only a philosophical parallel but a description of meaning at the level of structure. It is usually read as a metaphysical claim — that nothing has independent existence, that all things are relational. But it can also be read more precisely as a claim about meaning itself: nothing signifies in isolation. Form arises only against what it is not. Emptiness is not absence but the relational field in which form appears.
This is one of the structural tendencies of haiku. The old pond means what it means only in relation to the frog’s arrival. The frog means what it means only against the weighted silence of the pond. Neither term carries meaning independently; meaning resides in their relation. The gap is preserved because the gap is where meaning lives. Close it with a conjunction and the relation becomes description rather than event. The Heart Sutra formulation is therefore not merely an external gloss on the poem. Relational meaning — meaning that emerges between terms rather than residing in either of them — bears a structural resemblance to śūnyatā, the emptiness through which things do not exist independently of their relations and haikai poetry can be understood as a poetic practice especially committed to preserving that relational space.
The Heart Sutra names something real in the poem. But another Buddhist concept related to śūnyatā names something different — and, for the poem’s specific movement, more precise: pratītyasamutpāda, dependent co-arising. Here things do not first exist and then enter relation; they arise together, each constituted through the other from the start. The frog is not an independent entity acting upon an independent pond. Each is what it is only through the encounter. Neither precedes it.
Again, the poem sits between the two frameworks where they diverge. Śūnyatā tends toward simultaneity: form and emptiness are two names for a single reality, present from the start, apprehended from different perspectives. The formula does not describe a movement from one term to the other; it names an identity that was never absent. Co-arising is processual: relations unfold, and through that unfolding things become what they are. Old pond enacts both. Frog and pond are mutually constitutive — neither fully exists without the other — yet the poem insists on transition: the frog enters, silence becomes sound, depth becomes event. The terms do not simply reveal identity; they pass into one another. What neither framework fully captures is not relation itself, but the inversion of roles within relation — the way frog and pond exchange experiential position once contact occurs.
The fascination of Zen practitioners with the poem over the centuries may lie less in doctrinal compatibility and cultural affinity than in a structural resonance. Each interpretation seems to open another, as if the conditions of meaning were being reactivated with every pass. The poem behaves the way Zen thinks — and resembles, in compressed form, the logic of a kōan: not a puzzle to resolve, but a configuration that sustains irresolution, where the student does not solve so much as remain with the tension until the question itself changes shape. But even this remains a description of effect. The deeper question remains open: why should a poem of seventeen on generate this kind of experience at all? What is it in its structure that makes such reversals available? And if these reversals persist across readings, are they merely interpretive — or do they reflect something more fundamental in perception itself?
6. The Sensing Body
In contemporary English usage, chiasm is often flattened into a merely rhetorical figure: ABBA symmetry, inverted phrasing, decorative parallelism. But historically and philosophically, chiasm is much deeper than ornament.
Chiasms feel powerful and profound because they mimic lived cognition. Human experience itself is reversible: self/world, speaker/listener, past/present. We constantly cross categories that seem stable. A chiasm captures the moment categories exchange without disappearing. The rhetorical chiasmus works precisely because it echoes this deeper structure. When Kennedy says “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country” the inversion lands because it mimics something true about civic identity — that self and polity are already folded into each other. The phrase doesn’t just sound balanced; it performs a reversal the listener already half-knows from living it. Weak chiasms — purely decorative ones — feel hollow because they invoke the form without the genuine crossing. The terms swap but nothing is actually at stake between them. Strong chiasms carry weight because the reversal isn’t arbitrary; it reveals that the boundary was already porous.
Old pond is, among other things, a poem that foregrounds perception itself. The poem’s persistent reversals are not confined to interpretation. They arise at the level of experience itself, where distinctions between subject and object, sound and image, movement and stillness repeatedly blur and reorganize. Phenomenology, the philosophical study of lived experience, provides a natural framework for examining this dimension of the poem. Two phenomenological approaches, in particular, illuminate what is happening here.
A discussion of chiasm leads naturally to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose philosophy gives the term one of its deepest modern formulations. For Merleau-Ponty, le Chiasme describes the intertwining of perceiver and perceived. When you touch your left hand with your right, the touching hand is subject and the touched hand is object. Yet the distinction never fully settles. The hand that touches can immediately become the hand that is touched. Merleau-Ponty extends this insight beyond the body itself. When you touch a table, the table is not simply an inert object receiving your attention. Its resistance, texture, and weight help shape the experience. Perception is not something a subject imposes upon the world. It emerges through an encounter between them. When you are touching the world, you are also being touched by it.
This relation between world and self returns us to the synesthetic reading. The fusion of the senses is available because perception itself is not a one-way process. When the frog jumps into the sound of water, image, action, and touch are reorganized into audition. Yet the process can also run in the opposite direction. What is perceived reshapes perception itself. The reading does not only move from vision to sound; it can move from sound back into vision. We find that the old pond we thought we saw was, perhaps, the echo of the splash all along. Sound becomes image as much as image becomes sound. What was heard is seen; what was seen is inferred from hearing. Cause and effect become difficult to disentangle within the act of perception itself.
The Japanese phenomenologist Ogawa Tadashi approaches the same problem from a different direction and fills in what Merleau-Ponty leaves open. Where Merleau-Ponty focuses on the relation between body and world, Ogawa turns to the relations among the senses themselves. For him, sight, sound, and touch are not isolated channels that occasionally overlap. They are already intertwined. What appears in one sense immediately colours the others. Meaning is not assembled from separate sensory inputs after the fact; it arises within a perceptual field in which the senses are already influencing one another.
And the relation between Merleau-Ponty and Ogawa is itself chiastic. Merleau-Ponty moves outward, from the body touching itself to the body encountering the world. Ogawa moves inward, showing that the same dynamic is already present among the senses themselves. What appears between self and world is already happening within perception before the world is even fully constituted as an object of experience. The two accounts therefore meet from opposite directions.
This helps explain why the synesthetic reading of old pond feels less like a figure of speech than a description of experience. The frog entering the sound of water is not merely a linguistic novelty. In a sudden acoustic event, sound, movement, touch, and visual expectation arrive almost together, shaping one another before reflection has time to separate them. The reader who reconstructs the splash from the sound is not performing an interpretive trick. He is doing what perception routinely does: forming a coherent scene from sensory elements that arrive already entangled. The haijin who reconstructs the visual scene from the acoustic event is undergoing a process so fundamental that Bashō’s poem needs only seventeen on to bring it into view.
What this reveals is not a claim about what the poem is, but about what it can do in perception. The senses do not fuse; they can fuse. The frog does not enter the sound; it can be read as entering the sound. “Old Pond” shows perception as something reversible and unstable, where sight, sound, and meaning fold into one another as experience unfolds. Perception is not a passive reception of data but an active, reversible, and fundamentally synesthetic process. The poem does not describe a moment of perception. It performs the structure of perception itself.
7. Convergence
Precisely because it is grounded in perception itself, this structure—and the convergence it produces—is easy to misread as universal. It can seem so capacious that it might be applied to any poem. But the alignment it depends on is rare in haiku. The effect hinges on a configuration of properties so specific that altering any single element collapses it.
The pond must be old — not still, not deep, not green, but old, a word that gives the vertical axis its full paradigmatic depth. The animal must be small and fast enough that the senses cannot track the sequence of its entry, which is what makes synesthetic fusion available rather than forced. It must be kawazu, so that the hon’i is already present, ready to be reactivated or displaced. The sound must be mizu no oto rather than a named, determinate sound — open enough to precede as well as follow, to be entered as well as produced. Japanese, in this respect, is especially receptive to onomatopoeia and sound-mimesis; many haiku lean toward sonic immediacy, where the splash could have been rendered as a direct imitation of water striking water. Bashō does not take that path. Instead, he chooses a minimal and abstract formulation — mizu no oto, “the sound of water” — which withholds specificity in favour of openness.
Change any one of these, and the crossing no longer generates in the same way. The poem is a precise configuration in which every element is load-bearing. Its achievement is neither purely structural nor purely imagistic; rather, structure and image are mutually constitutive — Bashō finds the exact images in which structure becomes perceptible.
So far, phenomenology has helped describe this at the level of lived experience: how perception itself can be reversible, how sight and sound, subject and object, continually fold into one another as experience unfolds. But part of the poem’s interpretive gravity may lie beneath experience itself — not in a deeper layer of interpretation, but in the more basic patterns that make experience take shape at all.
In other words part of the poem’s effect may arise before reflection has taken hold of experience.
We have already suggested in Part I that the poem’s horizontal and vertical axes are not arbitrary inventions imposed upon it from outside. The main theoretical source for this claim is embodied cognition, especially the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Their central point is simple but consequential: abstract thought is not detached from bodily experience but built out of it. We do not first form abstract concepts and then apply them to experience; rather, we use recurring patterns of bodily engagement with the world to structure thought itself.
A standard example makes this clearer. In ordinary language we say things like “I’m feeling up today” or “things are looking down.” “Up” here is not describing literal spatial orientation. It draws on a bodily pattern: when we are physically upright, energized, or attentive, we tend to experience ourselves as “up,” while fatigue, illness, or sadness often correlate with lowered posture, downward gaze, reduced energy. Over time, this correlation becomes a stable conceptual mapping: GOOD IS UP, BAD IS DOWN. The point is not metaphor as decoration, but metaphor as structure — a way bodily orientation quietly organizes abstract meaning.
The same logic applies to the horizontal and vertical axes operating in “old pond.” Horizontality is not merely “movement in space,” but a lived sense of progression, sequence, and temporal unfolding — the way experience moves forward from event to event on a path. Verticality, by contrast, is the sense of depth beneath or behind that sequence: what is retained, accumulated, or held in place as a background against which events appear. One is the felt direction of happening; the other is the felt depth of what persists beneath happening.
In the poem, these are not conceptual labels applied after the fact. They are activated as perceptual intuitions at the moment of reading: the frog moves along a horizontal trajectory of action; the pond holds vertical depth as stillness, history, and receptivity. What matters is that these are not independent interpretations but pre-reflective structures that make interpretation possible in the first place. The claim, then, is not that the poem forces these orientations upon the reader, but that it activates structures already available within thought and experience themselves.
This is why the crossing in the poem feels so immediate. When the frog enters the pond, it is not only an interaction between two objects. It is a collision between two embodied modes of structuring experience — movement and depth, sequence and ground. And because these structures are already active at the level of perception, their exchange is felt before it is understood.
Furthermore Johnson identifies image schemas as recurring, minimally structured patterns that arise directly from bodily engagement with the world — not fully formed concepts, but dynamic structures such as containment, motion, balance, force, and boundary. They are what experience “feels like” before it is organized into language or abstraction. A typical haiku activates a small cluster of image schemas — usually only a handful of basic embodied structures such as container, motion, boundary, or force. What is striking about old pond is not the presence of these schemas, but their concentration and interaction: the poem compresses an unusually large number of them into a single event, where they begin to overlap, invert, and generate secondary relations.
The concentration of image schemas in a poem of 17 on is remarkable. The pond functions as a CONTAINER into which the frog enters. The leap traces a SOURCE–PATH–GOAL. The plunge activates UP–DOWN, moving from surface toward depth. The splash marks CONTACT and FORCE. Ripples spread from CENTER to PERIPHERY. Their encounter establishes a LINK between previously separate terms. The passage from silence to sound, and back to silence, suggests CYCLE. The water’s SURFACE functions as a threshold between IN and OUT. The opposition between REST and MOTION structures the whole event, as does the logic of BLOCKAGE and RELEASE in the sudden rupture of stillness. Few poems this short activate so many schemas at once.
Four further schemas reward closer attention.
Frog, pond, and sound do not remain three separate entities held together in one scene. Each undergoes its own passage through PART–WHOLE, in opposite directions. The frog, on entry, stops being a whole in its own right and becomes a part — absorbed into what the pond now contains. The pond undergoes the reverse: before the splash its surface is a single, undivided plane, no center, no edge, nothing internal to distinguish one part from another. The splash breaks that surface and divides the whole beneath it — produces a center, produces rings, produces the periphery that radiates from it. One whole disappears by joining something larger. The other disappears by splitting into something newly internal to itself.
The same moment activates FULL–EMPTY. The pond, empty of the frog an instant before, becomes full of it. But the fullness does not stay simple: it reveals that neither frog nor pond was ever a fixed, self-standing thing. Each is full only because each was already empty of independent existence — neither complete without the other. Fullness and emptiness, here, are not sequential states but one disclosure, seen from two sides.
NEAR–FAR operates on two planes at once. The pond is distant by virtue of being old — furuike carries the weight of accumulated tradition, an inherited poetic object rather than something immediately present. The splash collapses that distance: the venerable, far thing becomes, in an instant, the immediate, sounding thing in front of the haijin. The schema operates a second time at the level of perception. If the haijin does not see the splash and only hears it, the pond remains visually far. Yet sound has its own immediacy, arriving at the ear without the distance vision implies — nearer, by another measure, than sight could make it. The schema does not resolve in one direction. It holds both.
The poem also sets up a sharp imbalance of SCALE: furuike suggests accumulated depth and stillness, while kawazu is small, fleeting, almost insignificant. But the result of their contact — mizu no oto, the sound of water — does not stay proportional to either term. It expands beyond them, producing an experience in which a minimal event is felt as something much larger than itself.
The density of schemas is remarkable, but what matters is not their presence as a list; it is what happens to them. They do not remain stable structures of experience. Each is carried into transformation. The container becomes a source of outward movement. The path turns inward and disappears into what it opened. The whole that was the frog becomes part of the pond; the whole that was the pond’s surface is broken into parts by the frog. Far becomes near as the pond’s age recedes into the immediacy of the splash, then near becomes far again as sound, not sight, brings the scene to the ear. Rest becomes motion; motion becomes absorption into stillness.
What the poem activates, then, is not simply a set of embodied image schemas, but a system in which each schema is reversible. They do not accumulate as descriptive categories. They exchange positions. And in doing so, they begin to behave according to the same logic traced throughout this essay: a chiastic structure in which relation does not stabilize, but continually turns back on itself, generating new configurations from within the collapse of the previous one.
In this sense, what the poem activates is not a fixed inventory of embodied structures, but a field in which multiple structures remain available and can shift in relation to one another.
This is why the effect of the poem is so difficult to stabilise. It does not resolve into a single dominant schema or orientation. Instead, it sustains several at once, allowing them to overlap, exchange roles, and reorganise perception as the scene unfolds. Counterintuitively, more structure does not necessarily lead to greater stability or determination; it can produce the opposite effect.
The result is a moment in which experience itself appears unusually dense — not because more is happening, but because more ways of structuring what happens are simultaneously available.
This is part of what makes old pond open to many different interpretations. Across this essay I have traced several: Bashō’s poetics, structural linguistics, classical Chinese thought, Buddhist ideas of relation, Zen practice, phenomenology, and image-based cognition.
These do not converge because they share a common language or history. They converge because each, in its own way, encounters the same movement in the poem: not fixed opposition or resolution, but relations that turn back on themselves, where meaning arises through crossing rather than containment.
Other readings could be added—psychological, ecological, mythic—but the point is not to list them. The point is that old pond repeatedly invites the same kinds of interpretation across very different ways of thinking, as though it were less an object to be explained than a configuration that keeps producing the conditions for its own explanation.
This convergence of interpretations on a structure that behaves chiastically at all levels is therefore not a metaphysical claim about an underlying unity of all things, but a testament to the poem’s precision. Each framework that encounters old pond finds its own central concept there because the poem enacts a structure sufficiently fundamental that multiple traditions have independently had to name it.
We began with a simple observation: readings of old pond often feel discovered, and yet no reading remains sufficient for long. The frameworks examined in this part do not resolve that tension. If anything, they intensify it. Each illuminates something real in the poem, yet each leaves something behind.
Even phenomenology and embodied cognition cannot account for all of the poem. Merleau-Ponty and Ogawa describe what happens to any sensing body at the moment of a percussive acoustic event — the reorganization of the senses, the reversibility of vision and sound. But this is not any pond. It is furuike — old, accumulated, weighted with a history of usage in which kawazu had long carried its inherited associations without ever being made to collide with this particular setting. The phenomenological account explains the perceptual structure of the event. It does not explain why this event, in this word, against this background of displaced expectation, carries the weight it does.
For that, the poem’s symbolic and poetic dimension must be considered alongside the phenomenological one. It is precisely the crossing between perceptual structure and poetic specificity that makes old pond not merely a poem about perception, but a poem in which perception and poetic form become, for seventeen on, the same event.
What emerges is not a single interpretation but a picture of a poem unusually rich in relations, reversals, and latent possibilities. Again and again, different traditions recognize something in it that feels essential, as though the poem were able to inhabit multiple conceptual worlds without belonging fully to any of them.
This may be why old pond feels inexhaustible. Its meanings do not simply accumulate; they generate one another. Each attempt to stabilize the poem reveals further structures, further crossings, further possibilities for interpretation. The result is not ambiguity in the ordinary sense but a particular kind of fullness: a poem that continually exceeds the interpretive frameworks brought to bear upon it.
Yet if this excess is real, a question remains. Why should a poem be built this way at all?
If Part I and Part II describe a structure, Part III asks what that structure is for — and considers its extraordinary generative capacity alongside the sheer smallness of the frog.
This accumulation of frameworks is the densest stretch in the essay, especially since Tim Dwyer’s excellent question prompted me to add a part on embodied cognition. Before we move on to part III next week I want to address a familiar objection the analysis invites in English-language haiku criticism: the poem is also, of course, a frog jumping into a pond. One reading does not negate the other.
The gap in old pond is felt before it is understood — the reader doesn’t reason their way to irresolution, they encounter it, in the body, before reflection arrives.
What the analysis identifies as structure is first encountered as sensation — a depth that exceeds the surface, a strangeness that resists settling, a quality of aliveness that the reader may feel without being able to say why.
The frameworks — Jakobson, yin-yang, śūnyatā — are maps drawn after the territory has already been crossed. The analysis doesn’t produce the experience. It names what the experience was. And naming it precisely is not overintellectualization. It is the attempt to be honest about why something that feels simple is inexhaustible.
Orense Nicod
Reactions and questions to Part II are always welcome. Does the chiasm — the crossing between the frog and pond — feel like a structural observation or something you felt in the reading? Do you arrive at a settled interpretation or feel the poem turning?
Take the poll and let us know in the comments!
References:
Johnson, Mark. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Northwestern University Press, 1968.
Ogawa, Tadashi. Qi and Phenomenology of Wind. Continental Philosophy Review 31(3), 1998.
At the end of each post you will find a short anonymous poll related to the topic of the week (3 or 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.
and if you haven’t already take last week’s poll.
Discussion is welcomed in the Comments thread at the very end of this post. Meanwhile, if you would like to propose a topic you wish to see addressed, or better still, if you have an outline proposal for an article that you would be prepared to write—if accepted—please submit it to us via the submission form immediately below this text:
Why Moon and Finger? Zen, Chan, and Indian Buddhist texts cite the metaphor of a Finger pointing at the Moon with a caution: do not mistake the finger for the moon itself. Clinging to words or doctrines (the finger) obscures the awakened mind or truth (the moon). Thus, the analyses, views, and critiques of haiku in this feature are but the Finger. Haiku is the Moon itself, to be viewed by all. Views expressed here are those of the individual authors alone, except where otherwise attributed. They are very much open to discussion in the comments thread below. We all learn.
Introducing the hosts:
Orense Nicod is a French poet working across forms, with a particular focus on haiku. Born in Paris, she spent ten years of her childhood in South Africa before returning to France and writes in both French and English.
Her work has appeared in journals including Frogpond, Cattails, and The Asahi Haikuist Network. She has twice won first prize in the Haiku Society of America Rengay Awards, in collaboration with Joan Fingon (2021) and Anton R-kelian (2025).
A former teacher, she is raising her two children and her poetic expectations while co-hosting Moon and Finger with Keith Evetts on The Haiku Foundation.
Keith Evetts lives in Thames Ditton, Surrey. Life Fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. Aside from scientific papers, diplomatic telegrams, and local history articles, he’s written poetry of various kinds for sixty years, much of it sub rosa. Latterly host and managing editor of the Foundation’s re:Virals commentary feature since December 2021, one of the ten editors of the annual Red Moon Anthology, and an administrator of Facebook’s largest haiku group. Married with five children, cottage garden, grey parrot, and a sense of humour. His short bio is here.
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Comments (55)
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I found it interesting that as I read these comments a song kept playing in my mind especially its chorus:
Ripple in still water
When there is no pebble tossed
Nor wind to blow
Ripple by The Grateful Dead
Our desire to know and understand is foundational to our growth, but so to is our need for what we can’t explain.
I feel Basho’s old pond and your analysis of it provide a wonderful examination of how it can fulfill both that desire and need.
In any case, whenever I hear that Dead song now, I shall likely think about that ripple being caused by a frog!
Thank you, Eavonka — I have to go listen to the song now :) Yes, the poem does speak to both those needs — which is perhaps another way of looking at what Part III explores.
…”..kawazu was a literary word used in poetry from ancient waka onwards. I’ve seen somewhere that originally it referred to a specific species (the river-frog …) – Keith
Yep. And from what I’ve read, long ago in my life (and I’ve forgotten where I read it but I think a book about
Chiyo-ni) those Japanese river-frogs, were associated with upper class love: the male frogs sat on a lily-pad or the bank and serenaded their lady frogs. (so the story goes) That was in classic times, old times, long before Basho. That was the ‘old pond’ of the Japanese upper class. Basho would’ve known it well, that tradition of “a frog he would a wooing go…” .
Instead of repeating ancient haiku Basho wrote his then-contemporary haiku: “old pond/ a frog jumps into…”
with a distinctive call, evocative and haunting, which may explain why before “old pond” the frog verses focused on the frog’s sound rather than here, the water’s sound. And now I am also wondering whether the choice of “old pond” for a “river-frog” was another conscious departure in habitat. But that way madness lies!
Please excuse my mistake of (somehow!) including those last 3 lines in my comment. They are not mine.
Mine, Lorin. No worries!
In the first half of his career Bashõ (as you know) was rebelling against the tedious mass of courtly verses in renga. And in uncompromising terms. At the same time, reading and writing was spreading from upper classes to merchant classes (if I get the timings correctly) and he was encouraging the use of plainer words and more original expressions and themes. He was reacting to Teitoku’s earlier group, and while paying tribute to Sõin and the Danrin School, Basho wanted both to use the language of the common people and to avoid things descending into shallow ribaldry. (Bashõ: “if not for Sõin, we would still be licking the slaver of aged Teitoku”(Wikipedia citing Nobuyuki Yuasa, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (1983)).
In that context it seems to me (as a natural curly rebel) quite likely that, while not the main burthen of the poem, he took quiet satisfaction in cocking a snook at the “old pond.” As well as showing them how, showing a way forward, with the river frog not sitting on a rock beside a mountain stream calling sweetly for a lady frog, but plunging into the sound of water, leaping into a possibly muddy pond, becoming an everyday frog, disturbing the complacent pool. All without saying so directly. But we’ll never know.
Anyway, he got the vote.
Yes, I feel this also, that if Basho was radical with his frog haiku it was in undermining the expectations of his contemporary audience looking for pleasing, sentimental kigo. He use those kigo but pulled the rug out from the expectations, generating something that was extremely open to interpretation.
Mark, he was entering into a competitive gathering entitled the Kawazu Awase, so I assume kawazu may not have been a free choice of Bashõ’s in this case. His kawazu verse placed first.
I haven’t dug so far as to see if I can find other verses that were entered in the Kawazu Awase competition, where 41 poets entered verses for 24 rounds.
None of which detracts from the notion of rug-pulling.
If you’ve made it through the long trek of the essay, don’t forget to take the poll! At this point, you’re probably not counting minutes :)
Seeing how a number of poets experience the poem is a fascinating prospect for me!
Excellent Essay. Very good point made that can be easily overlooked: haiku as a perception moreso than about perception. Maybe the best haiku is closer to perception than being about perception.
Perhaps excellent haiku have just enough structure to allow the various crossings of sensory images/ sensory schemas
Though a bit clunky, I tend to use the term sensories/ sensory images rather than images to include all the senses.
Basho’s haiku an example how great haiku will often go beyond the conventions that aid a good haiku, such as specific imagery rather than abstraction. Sound of water allows more possibility than ‘splash’, And perhaps old pond is a bit of an abstraction as well. and I think ‘old’ allows more than using ‘ancient’.
The vertical and horizontal axis and yin yang make me also think about principles/schemas in Gestalt Psychology, particularly figure and ground (and I think ground could be either background or foreground). How the pond moves from figure to ground and back to figure again. Some haiku may have figure and ground fairly fixed, and other haiku may have more fredom of movement of figure/ground.
This haiku like many haiku, allow us to fill in what is not shown. Old pond- I often imagine a natural pond with a film of scum with moss covered rocks, surrounded by old growth trees, a thick forest with low level light. Another reader might imagine a human made pond, made some generations back, and it might be in a sunlit garden or monastery grounds .
We might sense what is not directly stated. I had read before this frog ‘sings’, not croaks like frogs I have been around first hand. Thanks to YouTube, I listened to the sound of the kajikagaeru frog- a pulsing chirpy song that fills attention. It was also noted that this song is associated with the coming of summer- and perhaps mating. So the reader familiar with these frogs might readily hear this and have other associations when they reach the image of the frog- a sound heard yet not heard.
Thank you, Tim.
I didn’t explore psychological readings of Old Pond in the essay, but there is certainly fertile ground there. The poem has been read, for example, with the old pond as the mind or the unconscious, and there are other psychological frameworks that seem equally illuminating.
I think Gestalt psychology fits especially well. You are right that the poem seems to stage an unusually fluid relationship between figure and ground, again through a series of reversals. And closure—one of the central mechanisms of haiku—also seems unusually active here, with the reader continually completing what the poem leaves unsaid.
The famous Gestalt maxim also feels especially relevant: the whole is other than the sum of its parts. That is, in many ways, what I am trying to explore about the poem’s effect. :)
Should we only look at literary haikai verses only, or just nature writing only, or what about natural history haiku?
I created a dedicated journal edition to natural history haiku rather than nature poetry:
The Blo͞o Outlier Journal Summer Issue 2022 The Natural History Haiku (Issue #3)
https://www.callofthepage.org/the-pan-haiku-review/
Of course there is some aspects of nature writing with natural history observations:
vernal pond
the wood frogs practice
their iambs
Kat Lehmann
The Blo͞o Outlier Journal Summer Issue 2022 The Natural History Haiku (Issue #3)
frozen creek bank
waiting for wood frogs
to thaw
Julie Bloss Kelsey
The Blo͞o Outlier Journal Summer Issue 2022 The Natural History Haiku (Issue #3)
The edition was in memory of a great natural history poet, Gene Murtha.
There are an estimated 10 billion individual frogs in Japan, there are around 40 to 50 distinct species of frogs and toads native to the country: https://edochan.com/writing/frogs.htm
And of course we really cannot talk about frogs and Japanese haikai verses without referring to the must-read daily blog of Fay Aoyagi:
雨蛙いつはりのなきこゑか
飯田龍太
amagaeru itsuwari no naki koe ka
tree frog
its voice without
lies…
Ryuta Iida (1920-2007)
Haiku Dai-Saijiki (Comprehensive Haiku Saijiki), Kadokawa Shoten, Tokyo, 2006
https://fayaoyagi.wordpress.com/2026/05/11/todays-haiku-may-11-2026/
frogs and more frogs:
https://fayaoyagi.wordpress.com/?s=frog
https://fayaoyagi.wordpress.com/page/2/?s=frog
https://fayaoyagi.wordpress.com/page/3/?s=frog
https://fayaoyagi.wordpress.com/page/4/?s=frog
Alan, it is encouraging to see many proposals for future consideration in Moon and Finger. As Orense responded to your comment last week, we’re keen to receive suggestions and proposals. And particularly, to receive outlines for pieces from other volunteers, subject to an editorial process. To keep editorial discussions separate from the comment thread, it would probably be best to send them through the submissions form (Moon and Finger Proposals).
A brief outline or more detailed proposal would be very welcome, and we’d be happy to take a look and discuss it further.
In general, no relevant haiku/senryu topic is ruled out. A quick read of our launch statement shows what we’re after. Here, “It will treat haiku as a serious literary form, which means holding it to the same standards of rigorous, historically informed attention we would bring to any other poetry. There will also be a varied diet. Amusement is not excluded!”
The emphasis is more on haiku poetics than on publicising or anthologising, but if some novel or astute general principles can be drawn from comparing a small number of verses, that would be welcome.
“old pond” did not open up for me, or become interesting, until a few years ago when I considered it could mean something more than the simplistic and causal splash sound that a frog makes jumping into water. The notion that a frog jumps into “the sound of water” gave it a dimension I could live into a while.
But for a while I was unsure if this interpretation was inherent in the grammar, or simply my own preferential reading. Inherent, specifically, in Japanese grammar. I found out that it is indeed inherent, and not as a subtle ambiguity, but as present and evident as the “causal” reading. And Basho would have known this.
For one thing, this shows Basho was not the concrete/realist that many have taken him to be (and based their haiku writing on). Of course, Haruo Shirane has written about this mistaken view. There is nothing concrete about “the sound of water”. It cannot be grasped. It can only be entered.
I am reminded of two of Basho’s haiku as translated by Robert Bly:
The temple bell stops—
but the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers
and
Storm on Mount Asama!
Wind blowing
out of the stones!
From what I can tell, these go beyond the literal, perhaps into Bly’s preferred way of seeing them, and so are probably more versions than translations.
However, given what is evident in the “old pond” haiku, they seem plausible to me, and may get more to the real feeling of the haiku than other translations do.
Basho has some where an elemental force fuses with a natural object. Orense has one of them up for an extensive reading in a piece likely to see light of day maybe in August. I have another that is one of my favourite verses by Basho for power, the changing and unchanging directly clashing, and “yugen” —and also for teasing rigorous traditionalists among ELH pundits, I confess, for he ‘breaks’ three or four of their supposed ‘rules’ But later…
Meanwhile this one:
ふきとばす石も浅間の野分かな
fukutobasu ishi mo Asama no nowaki kana
ふき fuki blowing
とばす tobasu to send flying, blow away
石 ishi stone, rock
も mo also, even
浅間 Asama Mount Asama
の no of
野分 nowaki autumn storm; literally “field-divider”
かな kana cutting word / kireji: exclamatory particle expressing wonder or admiration
generally rendered as something like:
blows away / even Mount Asama’s stones (or rock) / autumn gale!
(Except maybe the position of the possessive の gives pause for thought: maybe: “the very rock sent flying / Mount Asama’s autumn storms!” The / isn’t there as a formal cut though )
Over to the translator….
Oseko in Basho – literal translations vol 1 (free to read in the THF library) gives:
Blowing away stones,
On the mountainside of Asama,
The windstorm of autumn !
I like Bly’s rendering, though it seems the translator has added something that was not there: but, something good!
In the case of ‘old pond’ many translators into English have, by way of a punctuation break after “jumps in,” added a marked cut that is not formally there in the verse. Something not good. “jumps into” seems better to reflect the grammar, and it is not a full cut but a semantic half-cut, a deliberate ambiguity, that breaks open the poem into being sensed in a way out of the ordinary.
…and P.S. Peter, with the bell poem you’ve given me another idea for us to look at. Thank you.
Thank you, Peter. How you describe the poem becoming newly available to you is wonderful.
I think that is one of the most compelling arguments for openness in poetry. A reading does not have to replace a previous one to enrich the poem. The frog making a splash and the frog entering “the sound of water” are not mutually exclusive experiences. One can remain fully present while the other opens a new dimension.
I also think your observation touches on something important about Bashō. The image of him as a purely concrete realist has always seemed too narrow to me. As you say, Shirane has done much to complicate that picture. Bashō’s poetry often seems to move freely between the tangible and the intangible, the sensory and the imaginative, without experiencing them as opposites.
And your phrase that “the sound of water” cannot be grasped but only entered beautifully captures the way certain images seem less like objects than spaces of experience.
We have been warned about jumping into bodies of water during the red alert heatwave we have in UK (our village has aircon only in the gym and the convenience store, and the Thames is tempting). But here’s my frogku shot:
蛙かな 彼らのように 歌えます
kaeru kana / karera no yō ni / utaemasu
frogs…
just like them
I can sing
My voice is not what it was as a young man….
Our stretch of the Thames has a bathing place, but alas there are occasional accidents, occasional suicides, each year, sometimes with teenage boys egged on by teenage girls to jump off Hampton Court Bridge.
yellow iris
downstream of the bridge
police divers
(Fireflies’ Light, April 2025)
Dear Mr Keith Evetts,
If you haven’t seen this, it’s well worth viewing:
“Rave On for the Avon”
It’s an award-winning documentary directed by Charlotte Sawyer that follows a community of wild swimmers in Bristol, UK, fighting to protect the River Avon from raw sewage pollution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V84OmOUIoG4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jq1Cmkt2q6Q
.
frog suit crinkling in the big bath supernova
Alan Summers (just created)
and
toadspawn in chains ourselves
Alan Summers
“the segue axis”©Alan Summers 2021
Schrödinger’s MA and the segue axis by Alan Summers
Haiku North America 2021 Conference
Co-chaired by Terry Ann Carter and Lynne Jambor
Sadly, yesterday, up to 40 youngsters lost their lives in France to cold shock as they jumped bridges etc… in rivers. During the record-breaking heatwave up to late May 2026, UK emergency services reported at least 17 water-related fatalities across the UK, with the majority caused by sudden cold water shock.
.
sunday ripple the river police hopeful
Alan Summers
Publication credit: Weird Laburnum (November 2019) ed. Michael O’Brien
haikai/monostich series “Mistero due volte”
Thank you, Alan.
I have to admit, frog suit crinkling in the big bath supernova made me smile. It feels like old pond’s familiar elements magnified and transformed into something delightfully surreal and cosmic.
The heatwave certainly seems to have given our frog discussion an unexpected contemporary dimension. I appreciate you sharing these reminders that water can be a source of vulnerability as well as delight. They provide a sobering counterpoint to the many more idyllic ponds and rivers we’ve been imagining.
I hope everyone stays safe in the heat.
I have to admit that with the heatwave I am becoming more and more sympathetic to the frog’s point of view.
I enjoyed both poems. The first made me smile, and the second is a reminder that water is never only one thing. Throughout this discussion the pond has been tranquility, memory, imagination, tradition, and now, through your poem, something more ambiguous and sobering as well.
Perhaps that is part of the enduring power of water imagery. It accommodates an extraordinary range of human experience.
In any case, thank you for helping ensure that the frog population of this comment section remains healthy. :)
This discussion is getting more and more interesting! Orense, you have stirred the pot into something like I have never seen before.
I have lived beside a frog pond for more than twenty years, and my greatest springtime delight is to hear the first frog call. First night maybe just one or two tree frogs hesitantly peeping. Then more peepers, and croakers, and soon the whole orchestra at full blast.
Here’s my explanation on why they are doing it:
After a long winter
so much to say
in frog pond
Thank you, John—that is a beautiful image, and I really like the progression you describe, from hesitant calls to a full spring chorus.
That kind of conversational energy is what Moon and Finger hopes to encourage :)
I read this in-depth essay and the many comments with great pleasure, and my mind is currently working through all the fascinating possibilities.
What I’d like to contribute is this: In my doctoral dissertation, I examined whether—and if so, what—significance head hair had among the Germanic peoples. In doing so, I worked with a mountain of early medieval source material. To my frustration, I had to ask myself whether it is possible for me, as a person of my own time, with my own experiences and background, to “truly” understand the mindset of early medieval people. How close could I really get to them and their views of the world?
The longer I thought about it, the more certain I became that I could not bridge this mental gap. And didn’t that mean—or inevitably imply—that my research would, above all, paint a fictional and certainly incomplete picture of the past? Wasn’t my research, above all, one thing: a snapshot, trapped in time, of an inquiring mind of my own era?
How close can we get to Basho? I don’t know!
But we can see what that much-loved frog haiku still tells us today; we can see if we can write haiku with a similar impact (unlikely); and we can engage in communication with one another. Perhaps that is the true gift!
I think it’s wonderful that so many of us are trying our hand at writing our own Basho-inspired frog haiku and thus carrying on the tradition.
Here’s mine :-)
family reunion
in the old pond
new tadpoles
Thank you, Deborah. Your comparison with historical research is a fascinating one. I’m curious whether any poems appeared in the material you were working with. It seems to me that poetry can sometimes preserve traces of how people felt or experienced their world in ways that other sources don’t.
Where I perhaps differ is that I am not sure the problem is unique to historical distance. The gap between two minds is already impossible to bridge with certainty, even when they belong to the same period, culture, or family. We never have direct access to another person’s experience, only traces of it.
For that reason, I am not sure that fully recovering what Bashō “really meant” is a particularly meaningful goal for poetry. It makes perfect sense as a historical question, but art seems to operate differently. The value of a poem does not depend on our ability to reconstruct an author’s mental state with accuracy.
That said, I am of course curious about what Bashō himself may have thought. Most of us are. It is one reason we delve into biography, letters, journals, and historical context. In fact, I will be looking at some of those questions next week when I discuss the historical background and Bashō’s own words.
But poetry also seems capable of transcending both author and era. Bashō was interested in precisely that question. For poetry to endure, it must contain both ryūkō and fueki: the changing and the unchanging, the particular and the universal, the contemporary and tradition. It is this tension that allows a single poetic moment to remain alive across time rather than being fixed in its original context.
In a curious way, old pond itself may answer your question. Something old—ancient, perhaps almost cosmically ancient—is suddenly brought into immediacy through a single event. The poem collapses a vast temporal distance into the present moment.
Perhaps that is why the question of whether we can fully recover Bashō’s experience does not trouble me very much. The poem is already performing a movement across time. Four centuries later, readers continue to encounter it as something present rather than merely historical.
In that sense, I agree with you that the continuing life of old pond may be at least as important as its origin.
And perhaps your tadpoles make exactly that point. :)
I do agree with your thoughts about whether we can ‘interpret’ Basho or assign intention to him, given he was active over 300 years ago (pre-internet!). I think the text needs to be separated from the poet, at least in some respects, and I think Orense does a good job with that in her essays. A few years ago I was seeing so many Basho frog haiku responses and parodies I thought I’d start collecting them and maybe do something with them . . . but after a couple of days I’d already filled up a sheet of A4 with references and decided to give up – it would have been a full time job (and I already had one of those).
Thank you for taking the time and diving deep into the pond!
I must admit that I am exhausted, trying to read and understand this post and the previous one – which is really a thorough academic analysis of Bashō’s ‘Old Pond’. Like many others with learning difficulties, brain fog and concentration problems, I struggle to read texts that contain lots of nouns, complex words and long sentences; I need texts written in everyday language. That’s why I find it hard to read all of this, even though I understand the main points.
’Great ideas’ can be made accessible through simple language whilst still remaining great.
This may be unconventional, perhaps even unpopular … ‘Old Pond’ has never been the most exciting haiku for me. I like it (?!)
(I believe there are other poets out there who take a hands-on approach to poetry, too, who need to feel a poem first before any analysis can take place. And in this way deepen its resonance. I’m also always wary of reading an analysis by others, as it could destroy my original feeling for the poem. That’s happened to me before and left a bitter aftertaste. That’s why I’m cautious when it comes to engaging with scholarly essays. I want to continue to hold certain poems in high regard and not risk losing the effect they have on me. Which, in this case, was not the case.)
My first thoughts on this famous haiku years ago: perhaps Bashō wrote it with a touch of tongue-in-cheek, for ‘the old pond’ could stand for traditions – still, its surface present, accessible, with a depth (of centuries) – and along comes a little frog, itself accustomed to traditions and to the way things are usually done and have always been done, and instead of drawing attention to it loudly, almost as if the frog were fed up with croaking, it simply jumps in, and the only sound we hear is the splashing of the water. A sort of rebellious act. A leap into its own rebellious act. (I feel very happy with this interpretation, erm :D.)
Another way of looking at it: the frog could be the last remaining frog on the bank of the pond. Another one has just jumped into the pond ahead of it (hence the splashing into which the famous frog dives). The frog literally jumps into the ripples caused by the frog that jumped before it. In my view, that’s perfectly natural. It’s possible. The last frog doesn’t even feel the need to call out. To whom? There are no other frogs left. They’ve all jumped into the depths of the water, all those croaking frogs, into their element, for many reasons – frog reasons. The last frog doesn’t want to be left alone at the bank. Wants to be in its element, too. Wants company. Loves to be a frog.
There are many, many ways for the reader to read this haiku and to insert themselves into it.
(These are two frog poems I wrote while thinking of Bashō’s frog.)
sits in a puddle,
not a bit less
frog
(2023)
country lane
a frog hops into
a car tyre
(2022)
Thank you Kati,
I too have been struggling as I left academic approaches behind. Also even without the RED ALERT on weather as I’m in the middle of the intense heat area, I’ve got so many things to critique in my own way via Call of the Page (1-1 requests, several group commentaries) and wonderful family visiting from afar, that I’ve had to put aside these posts.
I guess I’ve read about Bashō’s hokku(?) over the decades, it’s not something that sadly enthrals me. There is so much incredible hokku and up to WWII haiku as it found its feet, I’ve moved away.
Was there a pond, a frog, or frogs, was a pond dried up, or several hundred yards/metres away. It is a tactical haikai verse, and possibly more of a desk-ku, than a Shiki early stage verse.
Of course in my first five years of deeply intense study sometimes 10-16 hours a day (I’m a Virgo, and was much younger back then and sometimes went a week without sleep for work etc…) I have written multiple frog verses. A kind of due diligence once I’ve read and studied that frog verse!
.
leaf wind
just enough frogs
to catch a pond
Alan Summers
after Pliny the Elder; Ryōkan; and Bashō
list vjetar
dostatno žaba
da se uhvati bara
trans. Tomislav Maretić
Samobor Haiku Meeting 25th anniversary anthology (2017)
.
sudden rainstorm
the queenslander’s plumbing
reverberates with frogs
Alan Summers
Publication credit: Azami Special Edition (Japan) ed. & ill. Alan Summers (1997)
Collection: sundog haiku journal: an australian year (sunfast press 1997 reprinted 1998)
Queenslander is a wooden building full of helpful spiders, snakes, and a dog, as well as frogs popping up in the indoors loo, which I loved!
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dreams of camouflage frogs from winter hiding places
Alan Summers
Haiku Seed Journal (Feburary 2022) ed. Sankara Jayanth
[monostich haiku]
etc…
Thank you, Alan. Buckle up—there is still a week’s worth of frogs and ponds to go. :)
After that, I promise not to mention old pond again for at least a year. Beyond that, however, I can make no guarantees. There may yet be an Old Pond IV: Return of the Frog. ;)
Thank you, Kati. And thank you for persevering through the essay despite the difficulties you describe.
I think your point about accessibility is an important one. There is always a tension between complexity and clarity. My hope is never to make a poem seem difficult for the sake of difficulty, but simply to follow questions wherever they happen to lead. It is certainly possible to express complex ideas in simple language, but that is also one of the hardest things to do. I am always trying to improve in that regard. If parts were unclear, some of that may reflect limitations in my own ability to communicate the ideas effectively.
I also agree that a poem should be felt before it is analyzed. In my view, the two approaches are not opposites so much as different stages of engagement. The first encounter belongs to the poem itself. Analysis comes later, if curiosity persists. I also tend to avoid reading other people’s analyses before I have developed my own sense of a poem. I like to think through it for myself before testing my impressions against what others have seen.
I enjoyed both of your readings. The first is particularly interesting because it independently arrives at something close to the ars poetica reading discussed in the essay: the frog as a disturbance not only of the pond but of poetic tradition itself. Whether Bashō intended that is another matter, but it speaks to how naturally the poem seems to invite such possibilities.
And I like your second reading as well because it reminds us how much remains open in the poem. I did not pursue some of the alternative pathways discussed in Part I, where the half cut allows that the sound may not belong to the frog at all. The sound of water could be rain, another animal, or perhaps even a predator. The poem permits more possibilities than we often assume.
Thank you also for sharing your frog poems. I especially like
sits in a puddle,
not a bit less
frog
There is something delightfully Issa-like in the way it grants complete dignity to the frog regardless of circumstance. :)
Most of all, I am glad that the essay did not diminish your feeling for the poem. If anything, I hope it encourages readers to return to it with their own questions and intuitions. The poem is larger than any single reading.
I should also add that Moon and Finger will include a variety of voices and approaches. Some essays will be in a more scholarly or analytical mode, while others will be more personal, intuitive, or experiential. You may well find that some of those approaches align more naturally with your own way of engaging with poetry, and I think that diversity is one of the strengths of the project.
I am sympathetic to your ‘tongue-in-cheek’ interpretation, partly because I feel it is believable that Basho would write such a poem in the 1680s, whereas I am not convinced that many of the other interpretations assigned to it would have arisen out of that context. I may well be ill-informed about Basho’s life, of course.
Ah, here’s what Shiki, the proponent of realism, had to say about “old pond” in 1895:
“When seeing this haiku, some people may try to read too much into it—wondering if the author’s ideal was to express tranquility and solitude, if it is a verse expressing enlightenment in Zen Buddhism, or if it points to some other meaning—but it should simply be viewed as a haiku that stands on its own, without any underlying ideal. It is simply what Bashõ composed upon hearing the sound of a frog plopping into an old pond.”
Is it, now?!
Shiki can be such a party pooper. :)
That said, thank you for providing such a fascinating quotation, because it almost makes the opposite point from the one he intends. If readers repeatedly find themselves drawn toward Zen, symbolism, or broader philosophical readings, to the point where a critic feels the need to instruct them not to, then that impulse must be coming from somewhere in the poem itself.
A closed poem does not require instructions on how it should be read. The very fact that Shiki feels the need to insist on a single “simple” reading suggests that other possibilities are not easily excluded.
His claim that old pond was composed on the spot is also historically debatable.
It would be interesting to know which period of Shiki’s writing this comes from, as his views on metaphorical resonance and realism were not entirely static and did evolve over time in response to different stages of his thinking and illness.
Shiki would clearly regard strong metaphorical resonance as a flaw, so he is, in effect, “rescuing” the most famous of haiku from that charge by placing a cap on interpretation. But I wouldn’t say old pond is flawed for generating multiple interpretations. If anything, its openness may be part of why it has remained so persistently alive within the tradition.
While Shiki fairly early on was critical of some of Basho’s work as he rehabilitated Buson, he praised him for unsurpassed “sublimity and grandeur.” He was more critical of the uncritical haiku generations that had followed. This was one of the short crits among poems used as examples for his students. Shiki saw Basho as the first ‘realistic’ haiku poet (i.e. not indulging in classical courtly renga / hokku larded with classical references and trite tropes, but producing from his lived experience unadorned, unexaggerated, original verses in plain everyday words) and I guess that is what he meant to highlight in this 1895 brief comment. There’s quite a lot of similarity in what Basho told his students and what Shiki was telling his own, starting with the Wind in the Pines Society at Soseki’s house in Matsuyama and furnishing material for the document I’ll go into here on 4 and 11 July (on present planning, and if I get a moment to write!).
We have another more recent party-pooper in none other than the estimable H G Henderson, Haiku West Vol. 8 No. 1 (July 1974), entitled in capitals: “DOWN WITH THE “OLD POND” HAIKU! DOWN WITH IT” !! Henderson wrote:
“This poem has been put on a pedestal and held up as the perfect model, the ne plus ultra of haiku. Of course this has been done, for the most part, by enthusiastic but only semi-informed foreigners. Nevertheless, it seems to me that they have done a serious disservice to haiku-in-English, and that it is high time for the “Old Pond” to be taken down from its pedestal and put back on the level where Basho himself placed it. Basho did not call the “Old pond” his best haiku.”
Henderson makes the point that Bashõ went on to write several better haiku in his mature style. He doesn’t claim that ‘old pond’ is no good, though; and he doesn’t address the point that it was revolutionary for its time. I could say that that “art history” accolade is part of what makes ‘old pond’ of particular value. If you were the haiku specialist at Sotheby’s wouldn’t you value the signed original of ‘old pond’ higher than the signed original of ‘this road /none travel / autumn nightfall’?
The burthen of Henderson’s short article was that the anglophone haiku community, mainly the HSA at the time, was fixated on the old pond paradigm to the exclusion of better and wider-ranging material. He arraigned “those enthusiasts who seem to believe that only impersonal, nature-oriented, and not obviously emotional poems (i.e., the “Old pond” type) are worthy to be called haiku.” “…there seems to me to be an almost frightening tendency for the writing of haiku in English to get deeper and deeper into a rut. I feel quite sure that if the average contributor to haiku magazines would read through a number of Japanese haiku, in the original or in at least semi-decent translations, he or she would be amazed at the vast variety, ranging from jokes to dirges, including references to history, literature, climate —or what have you? (And also, I think, at the gamut of emotions produced, from the powerful urges to weep or to shout with joy, to the delicate delight at the discovery of some hitherto unnoted aspect of Nature.)”
In terms that would have appealed to Bashõ himself, and to many another School before his, and of course to Shiki who was scathing about the state to which haiku had degenerated in his day, and to those who more politely drew attention to the latest rut ELH had got into, with fragment and phrase format and shasei-type verses, in the period around 2006, the admirable Henderson noted that “Certainly no such variety can be found in the average haiku magazines-or in the poems brought up for discussion at meetings of the Haiku Society of America-and I think it should be! I am sure that haiku will be more interesting if we can get away from the dominance of any single type.”
Thank you, Keith—that title is hysterical. :)
This is very helpful context, especially the reminder that both Shiki and later critics like Henderson were reacting against particular institutional habits in their own time rather than making absolute claims about Bashō.
I agree that Bashō’s reputation as a “realist” is partly constructed through later reading strategies, including Shiki’s own project of differentiation from earlier renga traditions.
I also agree with Henderson’s broader point, with one qualification. What has often been put on a pedestal is a filtered version of old pond, rather than the poem in its full range of possible readings. And in questioning the same kinds of stagnation Henderson identifies, I think making old pond strange again can be a useful starting point.
first of all, thank you for this extensive text.
i have never thought so deeply and so long about a single haiku before.
i made the mistake of approaching it as a puzzle
that i, in my limitation, even thought i had solved.
but what i actually took away from this second part
were not answers, but many new questions and thoughts.
horizontal and vertical – and a 45-degree angle
the essay speaks about horizontal and vertical movement in the poem.
seeing and hearing, perception and action.
a friend of mine said: ”i always recognise the frog’s splash.
it’s a unique sound.” imo she is right. it is different from a plum falling into the water, or a stone. the frog pushes off with its hind legs and dives diagonally into the water, front legs first.
b ut the frog dives.
so is the concepts of horizontal and vertical Literally and figuratively is more dimensional? also gain a 45-degree sideways movement.
the frog takes over the observation of the poet.
the frog dives and observes the hunter,
the intruder – bashō. :)
but for the frog, which perceives movement,
it is first and foremost escape behaviour.
it could be a heron.
from the frog’s perspective,
the movement is survival. so the frog dives to survive. what bashō hears is not only the sound of moving water. it is the sound of fear, of survival,
of a reflex that is millions of years old
questions that came to me
would it have mattered if a salamander had jumped in?
if it had been a stream?
What is the difference?
if it had been a 30 year old pond?
did he perhaps use the word for aesthetic reasons?
or because old age leaves traces, and it is a kind of term of endearment – old world, old man?
is it the power of this haiku that you can recognise so much imagination and so many concepts in it – time, space, life? the water is set in motion. this has consequences for the environment. the effect this can have leaves a great deal of room for what happens and what could happen – like a stone that changes the course of a river. and why did Basho not use dive? it is escape behaviour –
but we see it as a funny way of moving, one that only belongs to the frog.
or did bashō simply write the haiku in an aha moment?
after the first part after the first part of the essay, my reaction to the poem was: what a lot of words bashō needed for
pond splosh
but after this second part, i have started to think differently again. i especially appreciate the observation that, in fact, the poem is the pond – the ripple that continues and will cause change. and therefore, the awareness and perception of this poem will always offer space for something new, a new thought, i find that very reassuring snd beautiful: not a fact, but a being.
final thought
what i take from this essay is not a fixed interpretation,
but an invitation to keep experiencing the poem. the ripple does not stop.
it continues, even after the poem has been read. the haiku is an event that keeps happening.
with many thanks to Orense NIcod for this great essay!
After this:
old pond-
frog dives -
–
Thank you, Henk. I really appreciate the care and attention in your reading.
I wouldn’t actually say there was a “mistake” in approaching the poem as a puzzle. That is often the most natural first response to something so condensed. What I find interesting is precisely how the poem can sustain that kind of reading and then gradually open into something more about process and experience. And your shift from “solving” to “following questions” feels very close to the movement the essay is trying to trace.
On the question of verticality and horizontality that I discuss in Part I, embodied cognition does not require literal straight lines. It is more about directionality—up/down, left/right, forward/backward—as basic ways in which perception is structured. I like your idea of “tilting” as a way of describing shifts in perception; it feels very suggestive.
Your expansion of the scene makes me think of Gaston Bachelard, particularly The Poetics of Space and Water and Dreams. He suggests that elements like water are never just neutral surfaces, but sites where perception and imagination merge—where material experience immediately becomes reverie. From that perspective, the pond is not only what is seen or heard, but something the mind continues to expand into. Perhaps elemental “pondness” is also part of the poem’s resonance.
And your final reworking of the poem captures something important about what I take old pond to be doing: not closing meaning down, but continuing to generate it.
I am impressed with the depth of understanding that you, Orense, and other scholars can bring into this analysis. For me, trying to understand it in a gestalt way is the best I can do. By the heart, not by the head.
But I am intrigued by how eternal the eternity in it is. Yes, the pond might have been there for centuries or even millennia before that frog hatched. But there were frogs millions of years before that pond came into being. And yes, they were not the same frogs, but neither was it the same pond. The pond may have changed shape, and the water in it is not the same water. It evaporates from the pond into the atmosphere and in most cases also drains away by a creek or slowly into the ground, and new water keeps coming into it by rain, surface drainage, or snow and ice melt. So the frog has been there for as long as the pond, but not the some frog. Just like the water molecules in it are not the same water molecules (I do know that water doesn’t come in molecules, but in pairs of ions having a relationship).
Thank you, John. Encountering the poem with the heart is not really separable from encountering it with the mind, in my opinion, and I think your comment does both.
I like this observation very much because it complicates the apparent contrast between the frog and the pond.
The pond initially feels ancient and enduring beside the fleeting action of the frog. Yet, as you point out, neither is truly fixed. The pond persists, but its water is constantly changing. Frogs have been appearing and disappearing for far longer than any individual pond has existed. What first presents itself as permanence begins to reveal change within it, and what first presents itself as change reveals a kind of continuity.
In a way, this returns us to one of the questions at the heart of the poem: whether the distinction between the unchanging and the changing is ever quite as stable as it appears. The more closely one looks, the more each seems to contain something of the other.
And perhaps that is one reason the poem continues to reward rereading. The terms never quite stay where we first place them.
It’s fascinating that such a short literary form can evoke so many long and profound commentaries. The old pond grows deeper, and more and more frogs become part of it. Or perhaps there are many ponds, but only one frog? I recall the story of a man who dived so deep that resurfacing was no longer possible. Is this necessary and sufficient to understand haiku?
Interesting, Urszula. You have a whole bucket of frogs there.
My understanding is that the Japanese bare noun allows for kawazu to be read across to English as “a” or “the” specific instance of frog, or as “frogs” in the plural, or as the generic or archetypic frog. Perhaps the likes of Blyth and Henderson opting for a singular frog influenced the approach of later translators? Perhaps the single ‘real and present’ frog is the more natural rendering, seen through our perceptions, conditioned as they are by notions of what haiku “ought to look like.”
The hokku was for a kawazu awase — a “frog meeting” or “frog combination” or convention where (I understand) 41 poets entered frog verses for 24 rounds. The event itself comprised many frogs…
Kawazu as the kigo points to the species drawing attention in spring, that is, generic. A choice dictated by the kawazu awase. I haven’t seen the other poems in that event. As I understand it, “kaeru” is a common word used later by people for everyday frog(s) while kawazu was a literary word used in poetry from ancient waka onwards. I’ve seen somewhere that originally it referred to a specific species (the river-frog) with a distinctive call, evocative and haunting, which may explain why before “old pond” the frog verses focused on the frog’s sound rather than here, the water’s sound. And now I am also wondering whether the choice of “old pond” for a “river-frog” was another conscious departure in habitat. But that way madness lies!
For that matter, linguistically “furu ike ya” could also be plural “old ponds!” Or the generic “any old pond!”
I think Bashō had just moved to a new hut with a real pond, by the way.
It’s fun playing with plural or generic renderings of this verse.
Thank you so much for your thoughts, Keith. The more frogs I see, the less I understand haiku, but the joy of reading, writing, and experiencing poetry continues to grow, despite occasional breakdowns and the feeling that I have nothing left to say. Then, the haiku of others saves me.
Thank you, Urszula. I rather like the image of the old pond growing deeper with each new frog. Though perhaps, as you suggest, there may be many ponds as well.
As for how deep one needs to dive to understand haiku, I suspect the answer is: not very deep at all—and sometimes very deep indeed. A haiku can be encountered in a moment and remain complete as that moment. The deeper dive is not a requirement but a possibility.
One of the fascinating things about old pond is that it seems unusually capable of supporting both approaches. It can be a frog jumping into a pond, and it can also become an invitation to keep following the ripples. Whether one stops at the splash or swims after them is, I think, up to the reader.
People often set these two modes of reading against one another, as though immediate experience and deeper analysis were competing approaches. I tend to see them as complementary. The first is the encounter itself; the second is an attempt to understand why that encounter continues to resonate. Neither replaces the other. In that sense, analysis is not there because the poem failed to communicate. It is there because the poem communicated so effectively that readers keep returning to it.
That said, the question that organizes this essay is slightly different from understanding the poem itself.
What interests me is the larger question of whether the poem’s extraordinary success can be accounted for. Is old pond special? And if so, is it special because of identifiable features of the poem itself, or is its status largely an accident of history and reception?
The essay is really an attempt to explore that question. The various frameworks are not offered as necessary for appreciating the poem, but as possible evidence for why this particular poem continues to generate such an unusual amount of attention, interpretation, and rereading.
I touch on these questions more fully in Part III.
Thank you so much for your thoughts, Orense.
It seems to me that this old pond, broadly defined, is extraordinary in itself, and that’s why we’re talking about it. We, living today, have stumbled upon this incredibly famous pond right away, so objectivity is distorted.
This haiku lacks the sensationalism necessary for pure media success, like a frog jumping into a pond and committing suicide. Such success would be short-lived.
Here, the extraordinary constantly deepens. We all savor the secrets hidden deep within.
Much as I appreciate the comprehensiveness of your words (I and II) I do agree that the question of why, how this haiku has become so globally ubiquitous when contemporary English translations of it not only break so many conventions but would clearly be placed in the ‘not a haiku’ category by many people who categorise poems in that way – or would be if it wasn’t so famous and well-regarded. I look forward to hearing your thoughts in this area.
Just to say, I have not before heard anyone compare the jumping of a frog into a pond to words “splashing” down on a blank page (as I did) or compare the old pond poem to the very act of poem making. Probably somebody has. By my estimate, 9, 823, 033, 441 things have been said about poetry and I have only heard or read roughly 182 of them. Anyway, it was not presented as a criticism of the kind of deep exploration Orense is engaged in. In another fanciful turn, I would say that the old pond poem was waiting, and perhaps had been for a very long time, for the right person, and the right moment for its emergence. And in its nascent, or pre-nascent form, it contained everything that has been said here, and more. And Orense, if being expansive is what you need to arrive at such cogency, expand on. It is not so much the length, as the depth. And as to scattered thoughts– I meant that I would present them later– I am reminded of E.M Forster famously saying: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”
Thank you, Peter—this is a very generous response. I especially like the sense of openness in your framing, and the idea of writing as a way of discovering what one thinks in the act of saying it. I experience it much the same way.
And there was absolutely no offense taken. I did not read your comment as a critique, and even if it were one, I would still welcome it. The takes in Moon and Finger are often designed to be thought-provoking; they are exploratory and investigative rather than definitive. Disagreement is expected and even invited.
I’m glad you thought the development worthwhile. You may be right that there are also a few overly dense spots as a result of the rewrite. I hesitate now that it is “published” to edit it too thoroughly, since readers would then find themselves encountering different versions of the essay depending on when they arrived. My analyses tend to sprawl because it is difficult to know in advance which aspects of a poem will prove most salient without approaching it from multiple angles. The journey is part of the analysis, and it is not necessarily linear; it may involve returns and reconfigurations rather than a single progression.
I like the image of the splash on the page. It draws on something Bashō may consciously have been playing with, as the ars poetica reading suggests: the splash as both literal and metaphorical, disturbing not only the pond but also poetic tradition itself.
As for the 9,823,033,441 things that have been said about poetry, I wouldn’t dare claim originality. Some of my observations may well be new, but most of the argument develops threads that have already been noticed by others. What is mine, I think, is the particular synthesis, as I note in the introduction. Have I checked every corner of the vast Japanese scholarship? Absolutely not, and I suspect that would be a life’s work in itself. 🙂
A stunning set of analyses.
There are also Daoist reflections on ‘old pond.’ Peipei Qiu’s “Bashō and the Dao: The Zhuangzi And The Transformation Of Haikai” notes that Bashõ “repeatedly instructed his followers to study the Zhuangzi”, and that his disciples described his teaching as “encapsulating the quintessence of Zhuangzi’s thought.” The verse’s three elements, still water, the frog’s sudden intrusion, a pure sound are correlated with passages in the Zhuangzi. The old pond is Ziqi’s emptied mind; the frog’s splash is ‘the piping of Heaven, a sound that happens without a player.’ The pond before the splash is like Hundun, undifferentiated, unformed, and infinite. The splash is the moment differentiation happens (holes drilled in Hundun), that does not spoil the pond but reveals it. The frog is “a frog in a well cannot be talked with about the sea —he is confined to the limits of his hole.”
I’m not totally convinced by the above correlations, but there are some passages in the Zhuangzi that seem relevant to this kind of interpretation:
Inner Chapters -> The Seal of Virtue Complete:
“There is nothing so level as the surface of a pool of still water….All within its circuit is preserved in calm, and there comes to it no agitation from without. This virtuous efficacy is the perfect cultivation of natural harmony.”
And in reply to a question from Zhuangzi, “Confucius said, ‘People do not see themselves in flowing water, but in still water. ”
‘Old pond’ — the frog disturbs not only the pond but our contemplation of it.
Zhuangzi -> Outer Chapters -> Ingrained Ideas:
“Placidity, indifference, silence, quietude, absolute vacancy, and non-action: these are the qualities which maintain the level of heaven and earth and are the substance of the Dao and its characteristics.”
(This is the state of wu-wei, effortless ease, readiness—for the frog)
“It is the nature of water, when free from admixture, to be clear, and, when not agitated, to be level; while if obstructed and not allowed to flow, it cannot preserve its clearness – being an image of the virtue of Heaven.”
“To be guileless and pure, and free from all admixture; to be still and uniform, without undergoing any change; to be indifferent and do nothing; to move and yet to act like Heaven: this is the way to nourish the spirit.”
And the frog enters and disturbs this uniform stillness.
However, though I am no scholar, I see from other sources that in the period 1684 to 1686, when old pond saw the light of day, Bashõ and his Shomon school were studying Zen. Qiu writes that it was when Bashõ returned from his journey to the north that karumi (lightness) and several aspects of Daoism/zoka/Zhuangzi became reflected in his poetry: Oi no Kobumi is thought to have been completed around 1688-90. So it may be that applying a Daoist reading to old pond reflects a nascent emphasis on zoka but one that doesn’t seem to have been applied by his own circle, and others, until a while after the poem appeared.
All these various readings of ‘old pond’ are not only fascinating, but reveal why this particular haiku is extraordinary, riveting, exceptional. I think it’s safe to assume that Bashõ didn’t write it to demonstrate an extensive theoretical or philosophical approach in any way. Neither would I assume that the poem was almost accidental, casual, a lucky hit. More likely his readings, his travels, his practice (I’m guessing that he wrote and discarded thousands of haiku before ‘old pond,’ while only a thousand or so from his artistic life have come down to us in all) had put him in a receptive state of grace. Like the Lord’s cook who loves the “method of the Dao, something in advance of any art. When I first began to cut up an ox, I saw nothing but the whole carcase. After three years I ceased to see it as a whole. Now I deal with it in a spirit-like manner, and do not look at it with my eyes. The use of my senses is discarded, and my spirit acts as it wills.”
In his later years, Bashõ cultivated an “empty and infinite” state of mind: wu-wei, the state in which the cook after years of practice uses instinct to butcher an ox perfectly, the swordsman is alert and ready, the sage might find the Dao; and a haiku poet might write a masterpiece.
Zhuangzi: “Words exist because of meaning; once you have the meaning, you can forget the words.”
And from Laozi in the Tao Te Ching, a chiasm: “Those who know the Dao do not speak of it; those who speak of it do not know it.”
We haven’t yet reached that stage with Moon and Finger.
Thank you, Keith. The Daoist material is fascinating, and there is a lot there that resonates with the poem. The line “Reversal is the movement of the Dao.” feels almost too perfect in relation to what I’ve been tracing :) The broader questions you raise are very much where Part III is heading.
I agree that the poem’s brilliance is likely to have been a combination of conscious design, internalized habits and what I called auspiciousness last week.
I suspect Zhuangzi would be amused to discover that a frog jumping into a pond has generated several thousand words of commentary—and still counting :)
I have been meaning to say some things– some scattered thoughts to see if they coalesce. Not just yet. But some of my thoughts center on just what Keith brings up and Orense responds to. We do not know what Basho had in mind, or mindheart, or . . . . As far as can see, there is no indication, nothing that has been passed down, to indicate that he meant the poem as anything other than what most people (probably) think it is on first encounter: there is an old pond; a frog jumps in; there is a sound. This does not mean of course that the poem does not contain more than even Basho was conscious of. Or that it was constructed, according to its own terms, in such a way as to contain more than meets the eye/mind/etc. Poems seem to work that way.
I’ll add this (and should say I am only 1/2 through this installment– there is just about as much as I can handle here–) and it may relate to poetry in general: there are two additional parts at play here– there is the initial, phenomenological, wordless event.
Then there is what Basho wrote. The words (poem) would not have existed without the event. They are, in effect, a splash on an empty piece of paper. Is it too fanciful to say that the phenomenological event would not have occurred, or would not have existence, without the poem having been written? Ot that they dependently co-arose?
Thank you, Peter. Scattered thoughts are fine—discussion is often what allows them to coalesce and open new perspectives. As for being halfway through, this one got away from me. Tim’s question last week led me to reshape the argument to include embodied cognition, and with the heatwave in Paris and the kids at home, I’ve had less time than usual to condense it. My process is always meandering :)
One thing I wonder about is whether the distinction between the phenomenological event and the poem is as clear as it first appears. Even if there were a historical splash—though that remains uncertain—what reaches us is not the event itself, but the event as experienced and shaped by Bashō. What the poem gives us, then, is an event in language.
In that sense, this connects directly to where this part of the essay ends: the possibility that in Old Pond perception and poetics become difficult to separate. The splash is not simply translated into words after the fact; rather, perception and form seem to arrive together as a single event. Paradoxically, this may make interpretation harder rather than simpler, because if perception is always fragmentary, then our apprehension of a poem that performs the instability at the heart of perception must also remain partial and aspectual.
Is this not, in the end, what haiku seeks: the point where perception and poetics can no longer be cleanly separated, and experience itself happens?
Peter: when you reach the end of this week’s post you’ll see that Orense acknowledges: “Before we move on to part III next week I want to address a familiar objection the analysis invites in English-language haiku criticism: the poem is also, of course, a frog jumping into a pond. One reading does not negate the other.”
The main clues we have arise from Bashõ’s conscious drafting and revision, I think. That is:
—we have “old pond” which we know was Bashõ’s considered preference on revision. I think it’s very reasonable to look closely at that choice, and to assume that every part of the choice carries weight intended by the poet; together with reverberations it might reflect, whether they are Daoist (these are the undisturbed still waters of ages), or whether this is coding for Bashõ cocking a snook at the ‘haiku establishment’ of the day.
—we have the formal cut with ‘ya’ which makes “old pond” more than a setting: it becomes an image ( of age, of stasis) to be compared and contrasted with the part that follows (of transient life, action, sound).
—we have the deliberate choice, missed by many translators who inserted another cut with a punctuation mark after “jumps in” (into), of the possibility of synaesthesia, fusion of the frog with the sound of water, not just jumping in the water itself, rather than the rather boring “plop” or “splash” that cruder translators added to it. I think it is that which ‘destabilises’ the poem, and opens up all sorts of interpretations.
I somehow doubt that Bashõ heard and saw a frog jumping into a pond and wrote it down “just like that” before even thinking about it, although we know he had a favourable view of spontaneity and childlike first impressions, because among many other things, he said so. But so many of his mature works give the lie to that, I suggest: they are penetrating, carefully and tautly drafted, and reveal many-layered “surplus meaning”: that is, suggestive insight. If they were written on the spot, on the hoof, as acts of creative spontaneity, I suggest that they reveal that trained and honed “receptive mind” that comes from discipline and practice.
Bashõ at least left, via his acolytes, far more of his thinking than did Shakespeare, who left his works only, along with a few scanty facts of his life: which in the Bard’s case has enabled rather than inhibited vast amounts of inference and comment.
On the very rare occasions that I have read an interpretation of one of my poems, the interpreter has invariably discovered meanings, techniques etc. that I did not consciously put into the poem. I think the best poems create the ambiguity that allows for multiple
interpretations of the same poem. While I agree with you that, most likely, Bashō did not consciously invest all of the things critics have found in this poem, I’d wager dollars to doughnuts that he knew that he created something for the ages—and the feeling of wonder that I sense in the poem was there from the genesis of it.
Thank you, Joshua. I think this is a very perceptive way of putting it, especially the distinction between what a poet consciously “puts in” and what the poem is able to generate in readers afterward.
I tend to agree that most strong poems produce meanings that exceed the author’s explicit intention. That feels less like a failure of intention and more like a feature of how language, form, and attention interact.
I often find that I use alliteration and assonance unconsciously. It’s not usually something I plan in advance, but something I only notice afterwards, in the way the language has already begun to organise itself.
This is not unusual in my experience. In practice, a lot of what we call “craft” may involve a kind of delayed awareness—where pattern, rhythm, and sound relations emerge first, and only then become visible to consciousness, if at all.
The idea that structure can exceed explicit intention while still being fully present in the text is particularly interesting to me. The poem “knows” more, in a sense, than the moment of its composition.