Yellows
The tiny flowers
cascade down
in a free shower
of gold, different colour,
transforming the cityscape
a road, less-travelled;
the tree robed in yellow
in sharp contrast to the green
around
what a mesmerising palette
created by a pair of the mystic hands
out there
in the outdoors
seen daily; yet unseen
A Basho-like experience
for a Seeker!
Matsuo Bashō is recognized as the greatest master of haiku (called hokku, "starting verse," in his time) and during his life was recognized for his collaborative haikai no renga (comic linked verses). But he thought his greatest skill was in renku (classical "linked verse"). As he boasted, "Many of my followers can write hokku as well as I can. Where I show who I really am is in linking haikai verses." Renga was a group activity in which participants took turns spontaneously composing a verse in response to the one that came before. The verses alternated between 1t and 14 mora (syllable-like sounds in Japanese). Early examples ranged from the vulgar to the refined, but gradually lost its earthy character. This was revived by haika no renga, which was typified by contempt for traditional poetic and cultural ideas expressed in rough, uncultured language; they often cleverly combined elements of traditional poems with new ones created by the poets. The hokku was the opening stanza, which began to appear as an independent poem in the 17th century (and was also incorporated in haiga, a combination of painting and poetry, and haibun, "haikai writings," which combined prose and hokku; the term was coined by Bashō in 1690.) The haibun was more flexible than the strictly poetic forms and often encompassed analogs of Western autobiography, diary, essay, short story, and travel journal genres; Bashō's were generally devoted to travel, character sketches, landscape scenes, anecdotal vignettes, and occasional writings to honor a specific patron or event.
ReplyDeleteThe haiku is both suggestive and elusive. In 1689 Bashō was taking a trip. While writing renku in the house of a station master in Sukugawa (in modern Fukushima) he heard rice-planting songs in the fields and composed a poem that complimented the host on the elegance of his home and region — which he associated with the historical "beginnings" (hajime) of furyu or poetic art — while suggesting his joy and gratitude at being able to compose linked verse or "poetry" (furyu) for the "first time" (hajime) in the Interior (Oku). He wrote "fūryū no hajime ya oku no taueuta," which Shirane Harau translated as
beginnings of poetry—
the rice planting songs
of the Interior
As a child he was a servant to Tōdō Yoshitada and learned the renga form from him. In association with some acquaintances, Yoshitada and his servant composed a hyakuin, a 100-verse renku, in 1665, but the older man died the next year, freeing Bashō from servitude at 26.
His earliest known poem was written in 1662, and in 1672 he moved to Edo to further his study of poetry, where he quickly established himself as a star. By 1680 he had 20 pupil/disciples, but that winter he moved to rural Fukugawa, where his students built him a rustic hut and planted a banana tree ("bashō") in the yard, thus giving him his familiar haigō (pen name). In 1684 he began his life as a wanderer, though he also periodically continued to teach. He died in 1694 and was deified in 1793 by the Shinto bureaucracy, making negative criticism of his corpus blasphemous until the late 19th century, when haijin (haiku poet) Masaoka Shiki denounced his old-fashiioned style while popularizing his newer approach among fellow poets and the public at large. It was Shiki who coined the word "haiku" and was instrumental in making Bashō's poetry accessible in English.