A CRITIQUE OF “SIMILES IN HAIKU” *

 

PURASU BALAKRISHNAN

 

            Professor Raghavacharyulu, in his book of poems, Similes in Haiku, has added stature to Indo-anglian poetry. For convenience of reference (a point we shall clarify later) we shall call them “halkoid” (haiku-like) rather than “haiku”; and for the same reason, we may call the book “Haikoid Similes”. In the three hundred and sixty-five haikoids collected here, to form a neat calendar of the year (though not in terms of the seasons), we have an abundance of poetic draughts for which we may be grateful. As Professor K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar says in his foreword to the book, whether one reads these serially or dips into them at random, one feels duly rewarded and is set thinking a little on his own. We fully concur with Professor Srinivasa Iyengar that this collection makes, in his words, a splendid achievement. It takes its place alongside Tagore’s “Stray Birds,” and it has a. unique place owing to its haikoid nature.

 

            We shall first survey the book as poetry, and then deal with its haiku-haikoid aspect.

 

            The diction, as a rule, is happy, and the images strike one by their sheer appropriateness:

 

            A good man’s virtue,

            Like the gem in the clay-cart,

            Is a fact of grace.                                  (No. 52)

 

            There seems, on the face of it, nothing astounding in the statement. But letting it sink into one’s mind, one perceives its manifold appropriateness; and this is the acid test for applying the epithet “great” to any writing.

 

            There is power of utterance, as in

 

            Unless the mind burns,

            Like the lens under a ray,

            Truth has no power.                              (No. 58)

 

*Smiles in Haiku, D. V. K. Raghavacharyulu. Maruthi Book Depot, Guntur. Price: Rs. 20.

 

or as in

 

            Love, like a sword drawn,

            Forces its entry into

            The innocent heart.                               (No. 317)

 

At times it achieves a colour-effect, as in

 

            The blazoned summer,

            Like a sum of bright suns, whirls

            In golden fury.                                      (No. 325)

 

or as in

 

            The water-lily,

            Like the lady of the lake,

            Wears a snow-white robe                     (No. 79)

 

which have the magic of poetry. The poet, at least on one occasion, has captured the charm

of Kalidasa in an echo, as in

 

            The maiden’s glances,

            Like light upon water, splash

            A ripple of pearls.                                 (No. 40)

 

            When a poet has given us such plenty, it may look churlish to find flaws in his creation. But, under the constraint of informed objectivity, we have to point out that none of the pearls that we have exhibited from his collection, is a true haiku. Nor are the others that we have not exhibited. Notwithstanding this, we may still enjoy them as poetry. For poetry, like a rose, by whatever name it is called, is its own self.

 

            The distinguishing feature of the haiku is that it paints. a picture, or shall we say, it etches a sketch, but does not say anything about it, whereas the simile, while it gives a picture, says everything about it, at least as the poet would have it at that moment of time. The two are incompatible. We shall expatiate on this further.

 

            It is more true to say that the haiku evokes a picture rather than paints it. And the picture is self-evolving or self-expanding, in terms of the ripples of sensations caused in the reader, like the ripples caused by a stone dropped in a well. The picture serves as an evocation of a mood or sensation. Any explanation or suggestion, however slight, put into a haiku, at once dehaikues it. The haiku arrests a moment of life or the universe in its unalloyed purity or “suchness”–what the Japanese call sono-mama–without comment. This it often does by means of juxtaposition of images or superimposition of one image on another. It just beckons to the reader, “Look!” And it is well worth looking at. And looked at, it draws the reader deeper and deeper into itself, or rather, beyond itself. The haiku has been described as a “wordless poem”. The truth is that the wordless poetry starts where the few bare words – the seventeen syllables or jion (Japanese symbol-sounds) – of the haiku end. The greater poetry of the haiku is in the silence extending beyond the bare, brief utterance, unchartered, but lending itself to be chartered by the reader in the light of his own sensations and his individual make-up.

 

            A simile is a comment on the images juxtaposed or super­imposed; and this comment, or particularised way of thinking, effectively stills the ripples. It points to a manner of chartering its own evocation, and thus nullifies the evocation. Kalidasa’s poetry is full of haiku moments, which his similes are, but they are not haiku. They may be described as solved haiku. We may call them haikoid or haiku-like. Thus, from his Abhijnana­Sakuntalam, we give one:

 

            Sunrise in the east

            Moonset in the west­

            The law of vicissitude

 

            We may however convert this into a haiku by just omitting the simile or solving component of the verse, thus:

 

            Sunrise in the east

            Moonset in the west

 

            It will be noticed that here two pictures or images are juxtaposed, as in the haiku.

 

            Just as a simile translates the haiku (in the sense of Bottom having been “translated” in Shakespeare’s play), a name or caption given to a haiku only serves to exhibit its insufficiency. In a personal communication to the present writer, Mr. Alexis Rotella, President of the Haiku Society of America, writes, “Haiku, in general, do not have titles because the essence of what is said should include the meaning of what the title conveys. In other words, if a haiku needs a title, it is a weak piece of work. Haiku are not three-line poems.”

 

            In a similar manner, the essence of what is said in the haiku should include what the simile incorporated in it conveys, and the similes are to be done away with.

 

            We shall illustrate these considerations from Professor Raghavacharyulu’s book itself.

 

            Some of his simile-haiku expound an idea:

 

            The long-repeated lie,

            Like the emperor’s new clothes,

            Renders truth a fake                              (No. 210)

 

 

or

 

            Sound to tone must turn,

            To say the most with the least,

            Like a Vedic hymn                                (No.241)

 

            These abstract ideas while in themselves well-rendered, are far-removed from evocative images of a haiku. The maxims (kurals) of Tiruvalluvar, although they are much more compact than the haiku, consisting as they do of fourteen symbol-sounds (or asai in Tamil) as compared with the seventeen of the haiku, and vast and varied in content, are not haiku.

 

            Other simile-haiku of Professor Raghavacharyulu are fine poetry and draw a picture, but they are dehaikued by the simile put into them, as in

 

            Gently the snow drifts

            Across the valley, like swans

            In the lily-pond                                     (No. 207)

 

Shorn of the simile, this picture may b¢ made into a haiku, as follows:

 

            In the lily pond

                        swans float

            Across the valley

                        snow drifts

 

Another example of his simile-haiku:

 

            A fresh-water spring,

            Like sprightly children at play,

            Sparkles with laughter                           (No. 53)

 

This may be recreated as a haiku thus:

 

            The fresh-water spring

                        sparkles

            Sprightly children around it

                        laugh and play

 

In recreating them, we have followed only the sense of the haiku, not their syllabic count.

 

            Other simile-haiku of Professor Raghavacharyulu, though they etch a picture, do not lend themselves to such conversion, since there is no juxtaposition or superimposition of images in them, as in the following:

 

            The ice-berg in fog,

            Like a festive chariot,

            Looms in the ocean                               (No. 206)

 

            We would fain turn from these experiments to a haiku of the famous master Basho and its interpretation, in order to view these in its light which reveals the surpassing nature of the haiku. We quote from Geoffrey Bownas’s introduction to the Penguin Book of Japanese Verse:

 

            He (the haiku poet) should so express the nature of the particular as to define, through it, the essence of all creation; his seventeen syllables should capture a Vision into the nature of the world. Here is the intuitive flash of Zen which also affects the structure of Basho’s most famous poem and many other notable haiku,

 

            An old pond

            A frog jumps –

            In ­Sound of water

 

            – the statement first of the unchanging, then the momentary, and finally, the splash, the point of interaction between the two.

 

            In order to show the expanding nature of the ripples caused by the impact of the haiku on the reader, we may add to this Dorothy Britton’s interpretation of this same haiku in her introduction to Basho”s Narrow Road to a Far Province: A Haiku Journey:

 

            On the surface, this poem simply presents a beautiful picture complete with sound effects. It carries one, in imagination, to the veranda of a temple in Kyoto, perhaps, overlooking a landscaped garden hundreds of years old with a moss-edged pond. One hears the sudden plop of a frog jumping into the dark water on a still spring afternoon. But the thought processes started by this poem go on and on. The pond could be eternity, God, or the Ultimate Truth about this universe and man. And we, brash mortals with our works and our inventions–each one of us no better than a frog jumping in – make but a moment’s splash, and the ripples circle and die away ....

 

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