ASPECTOS DE LA CONSTITUCIONALIDAD Y EL TRIBUNAL CONSTITUCIONAL
10.1. La constitucionalidad de las leyes
I believe that Pound did not write the poems referred to above as if he was a Japanese monk like Basho. I would like to suggest that my understanding of Pound’s poems in ‘Haiku style’ was created because of the similarity in images and word patterns between his and Basho’s poems, not because Pound intended to write an Eastern poem with Basho’s culture and religious assumptions. Therefore, I would like to use such similarities between Pound’s and Basho’s poetry to point out Pound’s understanding and misunderstanding of the Haiku spirit by reversing his methodology: by reading a Haiku poem from a Western perspective and reading Pound’s poems from the perspective of my own Eastern knowledge.
90 Jones, p. 130.
91 Ezra Pound, Literary essays of Ezra Pound (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), p. 9. 92 Cor van den Heuvel, p. xi.
In my view, there was a considerable distance between the Haiku image and that created by Imagist poetry. Although both were supposed to use ‘precious terms’ that tended to be typical of Japanese poetry, the Haiku image seemed to be permanent and eternal, whereas which the Imagist poet captured was temporary and momentary. This could evoke Wordsworth’s ‘Spots of Time’, which Jonathan Bishop wrote about:
The ‘Spots of Time’ are the two incidents introduced by Wordsworth’s own use of the phrase: “There are in our existence spots of time, / That with distinct pre-eminence retain / A renovating virtue”; that is, the little boy’s encounter with the gibbet and his wait for his father’s horses. Yet the poet’s language implies that there were in fact many such “spots”, from which his mind could draw new strength, and every readers of The Prelude will at once associate with these two those other “passengers of life” which collectively establish the greatness of the poem. 93
Thus, as my interpreting, each of the ‘spots of time’ supplied kaleidoscopic images of things happening in front of our eyes that continuously changed and disappeared as quickly as the moment we saw them. This was shown in one of Ezra Pound’s short poems when he wrote about the sudden appearance of the eyes of a ‘beautiful Normande cocotte’, which reminded him of the eyes of a ‘very learned British Museum assistant’;94 in the moment when the encounter’s eyes ‘explored me’,95 each dream-time took him to various incarnations:
So-shu dreamed,
And having dreamed that he was a bird, a bee, and a butterfly, He was uncertain why he should try to feel like anything else, Hence his contentment.96
However, it was a deniable dream: ‘Even in my dream you have denied yourself to me’.97 It could be said that the non-repeatable incident, the sole experience and the immediate response of emotions and senses all contributed to the images in Pound’s poems. The personal was supposed to have been living many different lives and experiencing the same events many different times.
93Jonathan Bishop, ‘Wordsworth and the "Spots of Time”’ (The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1959), Vol. 26, No. 1, p. 45.
94 Ezra Pound, Collected shorter poems, 2nd edn. (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), p. 180. 95 Pound, ibid, p. 120.
96 Pound, ibid, p. 129. 97 Pound, ibid, p. 105.
In contrast, like Eastern traditional poetry, Japanese Haiku tended to keep the unchangeable moments and beauties of normal life. That was the reason why with a strict short form of 17 syllables that produced thousands of poems, Haiku poets were observed to praise the ‘precious terms’ of seasons as their final aim of composing. Therefore, Haiku poems were usually arranged into four subjects of spring, summer, autumn and winter and, even if some poems were named, they could be blurred easily to become a slice of a huge picture illustrating seasons. An apt example would be three of many cherry blossom poems by Basho:
Clouds of cherry blossoms- The peal of a bell,
From Ueno or Asakusa?
With cherry blossoms as my inn From their beginning to the end – Twenty days or so.
All kinds of things I recollect –
Cherry blossoms.98
Unlike the images of moments that appeared and disappeared like a flash in Imagist poetry, the case of cherry blossoms in these poems by Basho might include numerous places (‘Ueno’, ‘Asakusa’, ‘my inn’), and time might have passed (‘twenty days or so’) in recollecting memories, but the image left behind at last is the immortality of spring beauty. I think about this beauty as it was interlocked and woven by cherry blossoms like clouds, the beauty that made the monk Basho feel ecstatic, and wonder whether the bell which was vibrating on the clouds of cherry blossoms, was from the pagoda in Asakusa or Ueno. Indeed, this bell should be explored further. In the Edo period, people used bells to recognise time. Living near the riverbank, Basho could, at the same time, hear the sound of the bells in both Asakusa and in Ueno Park. Here, it could be said that the edge of time was blurred by nature. Therefore, the scene of cherry blossom clouds could be a moment or every moment, present, future or the past. This is repeated in the two other poems; while the appearance of cherry blossoms is considered to last ‘twenty days or so’, from the ‘beginning to the end’, it may also be the last thing left after recollecting a whole life. It has been suggested that, in Haiku poetry, temporariness was a symbol for permanence, modification expressed invariance,
small things referred to majesty, weak light reflected darkness and insignificant sound was evidence of total silence. This may be derived from the traditional Japanese concept which respected durability, inviolability and stability. It also explains why the image of Mount Fuji, the traditional time of Edo, hallowed places like pagodas, hometowns or objects like bells were mentioned alongside the fragmentary, fragile beauty of cherry blossom, camellia, warblers, summer grasses, evening breezes and so on.
Therefore, as opposed to the idea that ‘A haiku is the expression of a temporary enlightenment’,99 which made it seem to use the same method of creating images that Imagist poets did, in my opinion the images of Haiku were eternal and based on formulae of antithesis. These formulae could be considered as the arrangement of familiar images in contrast, for example, light and dark, power and weakness, movement and silence. However, unlike Western ideology (where these contrary pairings were just written for entertainment), in the Japanese concept, they were supposed to contain poetic, educational and religious meanings.
The second point which helps to distinguish Japanese Haiku from the similar form that Imagist poets used is the use of metaphor. Even though Pound and his colleagues declared the intention to avoid ‘decorative words’ and to replace them by the ‘language of common speech’,100 in fact, they could not totally refuse the attractions of metaphors and comparisons. The first period (pre-Imagism) seemed to contain lots of English traditional characteristics. Ideas were expressed through the common usage of comparison words (like, as, more than), which were symbols of a visual connection between two different objects: ‘she’ is linked with the ‘pale wet leaves’ (‘Alba’ by Pound); ‘her skirt’ with ‘a dark mist from the columns of amethyst’ (‘Images’ by Hulme); ‘a tiny core of stillness in the heart’ with ‘the eye of a violet’ (‘Nothing to Save’ by D. H. Lawrence); ‘a thunder of church bells lies like a bronze roof beneath the sky’ (‘If I were Francesco Guardi’ by Amy Lowell)101. However, this approach probably established an imaginative association model for readers to explore in these poems. As time went on, in the period of Imagism, these comparisons turned into hidden comparisons and metaphors, even hidden
99 Heuvel, p. lvi. 100 Jones, p. 135. 101 Jones, p. 121.
metaphors in Imagist poetry. In such poems, the obvious characteristics of images were deleted and each reader was required to find them through their own experience. ‘In a Station of the Metro’, ‘Papyrus’,102 ‘L’Art’103 and ‘A Song of the Degrees’104 were poems written in this trend. Of these, ‘Papyrus’ seems to challenge readers who are just focused on exploring the meaning of poems:
Spring… Too long… Gongula…105
Gongula could be considered a word created by Ezra Pound. Without romance or any superfluous words, the poem is compacted into four words, six syllables. I questioned whether it was a process of planting in relation to papyrus, a sign of the unexpected length of spring, or just three fragmentary images that glided through the writer’s mind. The same kind of questions could be raised by the word ‘Gongula’. It could be said that the superposition of the sound of words such that each one is longer than the previous one lengthens the rhythm of the poem, as well as the feeling of waiting. That instance shows that the images themselves created poems without any effects of poetic methods. It seemed to be similar to the way Haiku poets did it.
However, there was a total difference between these two kinds of poetry. Haiku poets tried to cut out description words but still retained the relationship of humanity and nature as well as the connection between the present and the past. Thus, it was supposed to be possible to fill the blank spaces in Haiku poems through familiarity with the culture and traditional ideologies, or even by knowledge of Zen. In contrast, it would probably have been impossible to understand Imagist poetry through Haiku ideologies, in my view. This could be because, as Hulme wrote, Imagist poetry was part of the period of Classical revival and the product of modernism.