Del estado de derecho al estado constitucional de derecho

Ideologically, I suggest that Haiku and Imagist poetry had a common source: a ‘return to nature’. In the modern world, most things could be expressed logically by concept and science. However, the appearance of natural images (e.g. a little butterfly, delicate petals, an autumn mountain, a grey bough and a fan) was supposed to work against rational analysis. Such images seemed to retain pure

beauty. Thus, returning to nature could be understood as a way for poets to explore things in their original states, in which they could question their minds’ deep unconscious in order to contemplate and elucidate hidden meanings of living. Haiku was buried under the sediment of Zen (禅)71_{culture, which had profoundly} influenced the way of life, thinking and creativity of the Japanese in particular and Eastern people in general. On the surface of this sediment, Zen upheld the value of meditation and intuition; under the sediment, Zen emphasised nature in silence. For example, when someone saw a beautiful object, the best way to respect it in ‘Zen’ was to observe it in silence. The object itself was beauty expressed nonverbally. From that perspective, I understand Imagist poetry to be a creation taken from normal life with no fussy description or explanation. Imagist poets let images make poems themselves. The relation between ‘Zen’ and Haiku poetry was close; traditional Japanese poets learned and followed ‘Zen’72_.

The ‘return to nature’ was marked by the use of a special term (e.g. spring, summer, autumn or winter) in Japanese poems, which was known as a ‘precious term’ (‘kigo’ in Japanese). However, using a ‘precious term’ did not mean that Haiku was traditional poetry with a rigid formula. Instead of using specific terms for the four seasons, Haiku poets tended to turn them into vivid images like cherry, blossom, swallow... (Spring); sun, dragonfly, cicada, grass… (Summer); moon, frost, cricket… (Autumn) and snow, field, mountain, wind, storm… (Winter). The instant sophistication of this approach was to create images which may be themselves in word-form but may not be themselves in understanding. For example, Basho wrote hundreds of poems mentioning ‘rain’ with different visuals:

On the cow shed a hard winter rain;

cock crowing. 73 * * *

Passing through the world Indeed this is just

71 _{From my understanding of the image-word in Chinese and Japanese language, the word 禅(Zen)}

in Japanese was collaged by two pictograms, one meaning ‘indicate’ and the other meaning ‘stage for worship’. Thus, the meaning of the word ‘zen’ itself was used to express piety.

72 _{‘Scholars guess that he (Basho) went to Kyoto to study poetry and Zen’ in Robert Hass, The} essential Haiku Versions of Basho, Buson and Issa (Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2013), p.22.

Sogi's rain shelter74

In the first poem, ‘rain’ acts as a catalyst. It falls on the cow-shed and makes the cock crow. The cow-shed and the cock might be separate, with no relation to each other. Perhaps the winter rain, like an invisible touch, pulls them closer together. These images create a soothing idyll. Contrast words are used to highlight the silence before the cock crows, then the crow introduces the sound of lively activity. Thus, this poem might imply a message that in wet, cold and sad winter rain, life still rises powerfully and mysteriously in a way that cannot be explained.

In the second poem, the image of rain does not appear directly, but can be recognised through the rain shelter. From the absence of subject, verbs and adjectives in this poem, it could be understood that the time man takes to pass through the world is just as short as a moment when we stand in a rain shelter named Sogi. Here, Basho has used the opposing mechanisms of length and shortness. ‘Passing through the world' could be seen as a great journey that everyone has to confront. It is strange that the poet removed the conventional sense, the familiar thoughts of endless life by narrowing the distance and time into a moment in a rain shelter. As such, life seems to be seen only in a blink of the eye, which is ephemeral. Moreover, the rain shelter could symbolise a station in the whole of life’s journey, which has no starting point or destination. It has become a cycle. The understanding of this cyclical life makes people treasure life’s moments and keep their minds peaceful when facing sudden changes, even if facing death. Here, the rain is a condition, an environment for each person to reflect on his life. It is quite alien from the existing meaning of rain. This philosophy was a common understanding in Eastern culture. This helps to explain why Oriental poets tended to write about fragile and simple things. They are symbols of a short, cyclical life. The movement of ‘passing through’ is frequently used to talk about a specific period of life. This is the death:

How refreshing!

moon over this gate through which, at last, I’m free to pass. 75

74 _{William J. Higginson, The Haiku Seasons: Poetry of the Natural World, (Tokyo: Kodansha}

International, 1997), p. 25.

The return to nature also made the poetry of Ezra Pound seem explosive. In ‘Vorticism’, in The Fortnightly Review (September 1, 1914), Pound attempted to use a thirty line-poem form to describe the images and faces he was impressed by at the Metro station. However, descriptive words seemed to be useless in this case. In my view, Pound did not turn images into a second intensity – the intensity which is transferred onto paper – because the intense emotion seemed to appear only at the moment the poet saw or felt it. When this intense emotion was described and decorated carefully in poems, it was not as fresh and as true as the original experience. The initial thoughts and flexible meaning might have become lost in words. Thus, I read Pound’s poems with a thought that he pursued Haiku poetry as a pure way of 'preserving' the right image in its state of origin. He recorded images by utilising the maximum length of seventeen syllables in Haiku poetry in order to exploit the space and silence between words and images:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. 76

In this poem, verbs are hidden and only two adjectives appear, yet throughout the poem, there are continuous images like screens in a film. These are used as an interpretation since the non-logical images received at the same time have no relation to each other. The apparition of faces is also the appearance and disappearance of petals. Moreover, the faces seem to have the characteristics of petals which makes them appear pure. The crowd suggests interlacement like the bough and the words ‘Station of the Metro’ creates the feeling of busy life like a web of branches. The first line symbolises urban life and the second one expresses countryside. These places contain competing ideas: among faces and between petals and bough. The ‘wet, black bough’ makes it seem a challenge for the fragile petals to be alive. However, it is life, and people should learn to face it. In Eastern ideology, this could remind us of the cycle of life which starts with birth, continues with disease and ends with death. Pound could make none of these philosophical reflections either in the thirty-word-poem written at first, or in the fourteen syllables written in haiku style after that. He created this poem just through a non- verbal gap between two lines and his own life experiences. This is appropriate to

76 _{‘In a Station of the Metro’, Ezra Pound, Selected Poems, edited and with an introduction by T. S.}

the spirit of Haiku: ‘What distinguished a haiku is concision, perception and awareness – not a set number of syllables’. 77