Like the traditions of iambic pentameter and the sonnet, set forms such as the Japanese haiku and the Persian ghazal , discussed below, say more when placed in their literary and cultural contexts. For example, each is influenced by a religious worldview—haiku by Buddhism and ghazal by Islam—which shapes even its descriptions of ordinary life. Each makes use of a highly traditional body of imagery. The ghazal's includes wine, the road, the mirror, and the nightingale, while the haiku’s include standard images of the seasons, such as spring plum blossoms, summer spiders, the autumn moon, and the winter bush warbler. And each is shaped by a set of rules about form that place limits on the scope of the poem and therefore the poet's way of shaping his (or “her”–though in these traditions, generally “his”) response to the forces around him.
As with the sonnet, the formal structure of the haiku, as well as the body of imagery and cultural values in the haiku tradition, reflect an underlying philosophy. Haiku is a Japanese form 17 syllables in length. In English translation, it is generally divided into three lines, arranged in a pattern of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, but many poets traditionally wrote haiku as one long line. Given the differences of word order or sound quality between Japanese and English, the poems in Japanese may often be significantly shorter than their English translations. A haiku presents an image—traditionally, a scene from nature, often related to the seasons—with little or no comment or attempt to interpret on the part of the writer. Informed by Buddhist teachings, it often captures fleeting, momentary sensations on the edge of perception, with an acceptance that the world is passing and changing that is far different from the elegiac mourning for loss characteristic of much Western nature poetry. The form has gained a reputation for being so objective it seems not to represent a particular person’s way of sensing the world, though in many valued haikus traces of the poet's voice and sensibility remain in the tone and manner of observation.
Haiku evolved gradually from a more elaborate form known as haikai, or renga na haikai. Renga were long poems written by groups, often at parties or other social gatherings. A poet would propose a three-phrase opening known as a hokku, to which another poet would add a two-phrase continuation. Yet another poet would pick up on an image or theme in the preceding lines and add three more of his own. The process continued for as many as 100 verses on casual occasions, and for as many as 10,000 on ceremonial ones. The form involved a complex set of rules requiring the inclusion of certain standard images—such as the autumn moon or the changing of seasons—and other elements designed to give the poem a sense of motion and change. A strong opening was an important first step, so writers of particularly striking hokku developed a reputation and were much in demand as participants. In some cases, master-poets established groups of students who would study the art under their supervision. Over time, hokku came to be published in poetic anthologies and to gain recognition as distinctive and self-contained poetic works. The roots of the haiku were developed and perfected during the Edo Period (1603-1867), But it was not until the 19th century that the poet Masaoka Shiki created the name ”haiku” to distinguish hokku fully as an independent form.
Haikai itself began as a lighter, more popular form of renga. The poet responsible for refashioning this lightness to a serious form, reflecting more delicate and unusual perceptions, was Bashō. “The bones of haikai are plainness and oddness,” he wrote. Born in 1644 to a rich family, Bashō achieved fame early in his life and became a well-known teacher of haikai. In his mid-30s, he spent years traveling the Japanese countryside visiting Buddhist monasteries and holy places. His later hokku were deeply influenced by the writings of Chinese poets such as Li Bo and Tu Fu, and contain a deep sense of solitude, as in this quiet scene: “A field of cotton– / as if the moon / had flowered” (Trans. Robert Hass).
While Bashō often used conventional imagery, he felt that hokku should also draw from everyday life. His poems have the rare ability to evoke the immediate experience of a moment while opening out into reflection on universal themes: “On this road / where nobody else travels / autumn nightfall” (Trans. Makoto Ueda).
Another of the great haiku writers, Issa, was born over 100 years after Bashō. By that time, Bashō's innovations in hokku had themselves become a tradition that profoundly influenced young poets. Issa built on this tradition and took it further, adding to the conventional images a new range of subjects and a wry empathy with the sufferings of the humblest creatures: “Fleas in my hut, / it's my fault / you look so skinny” (Trans. Robert Hass).
The ghazal form has its origins in 12th-century Persia (now called Iran). Like the haiku, it evolved from a longer, more complicated verse-form, the qasida (see Arabic Literature). The qasida, which came to Persia from Arabia, was a poem of praise written to be performed at public festivals and functions. Similar to the movement from hokku to haiku in Japanese literature, the opening portion of the qasida, a kind of introductory love note, eventually achieved an independent form as the ghazal. Unlike the public-oriented qasida, the ghazal is for intimate communications. The word translates from the Arabic as “talking to women,” and not surprisingly the common subject matters are love, longing, and unrequited passion.
Ghazals are written in couplets (two-line stanzas) bound by a recurrent sound pattern that is part rhyme and part refrain. While there is no prescribed length for ghazals, they tend to be brief, rarely exceeding ten stanzas. The opening couplet introduces a rhyme that is repeated in the second line of the following stanzas, aa ba ca da ea, through to the end of the poem. Following the rhyme comes a brief refrain of one to three words. In the poem's final line, the poet “signs” the poem by including his name. Unlike most Western couplets, the couplets of the ghazal do not follow the same line of thought. Each couplet is a self-contained moment, and could almost stand as a short poem in itself. American 19th-century philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson once criticized this aspect of the form, declaring that the ghazal resembled the unstrung beads of a necklace. In fact, this disconnected quality, because it allows gaps and jumps in thought and experience, has appealed to a number of poets including Canadian Phyllis Webb (Water and Light: Ghazals and Anti Ghazals, 1984; Sunday Water: Thirteen Anti Ghazals, 1982) as being strangely appropriate to the 20th century.
Traditionally, ghazals address either earthly or spiritual love, in some case intertwining the two in a deliberately unclear manner. Since the Persian language does not mark gender, the sex of the beloved in the poem also remains a mystery. Two of the best known Persian ghazal writers are Jalal al-din Rumi, who wrote in the 13th century about ecstatic spiritual experience, and Hafiz of Shiraz, who in the 14th century combined the spiritual and secular kinds of ghazal with creativity and power:
Dear friends, there's a Friend
inside the night. Remember.
****
As you sit down to take command,
remember Hafiz' face and the way of kindness.
As the empty threshold
does, remember.
(Hafiz, 14th century; trans. Coleman Barks, 1993)
Another important branch of the ghazal tradition exists in Urdu, a language similar to Hindi but written in Arabic script. The ghazal spread to India along with Islamic influences, when the Persians brought their own cultural practices to bear on the native language and population beginning in the 13th century. One of the first Indian practitioners was Amir Khosrow (1253-1325), who wrote in both Persian and Urdu, a near-mythic figure who inspired legends and folk tales. Mirza Ghalib, who wrote in the 19th century, was one of the most outstanding practitioners, an Indian poet of great moral complexity whose ghazals reflected the upheavals and uncertainty of a culture threatened by encroaching colonialism. In the 20th century, the Pakistani Faiz Ahmed Faiz added a new strain of longing in poems written during a long imprisonment as a political dissident. The contemporary Kashmīri poet Aga Shahid Ali, who has lived in America for many years, has written English language ghazals in which the rich musical pattern, often lost in translation, stands fully revealed:
Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight
before you agonize him in farewell tonight?
****
Those “Fabrics of Cashmere–” “to make Me
beautiful–“Trinket”–to gem–“Me to adorn–How–tell”–tonight?
I beg for haven: Prisons, let open your gates–
A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight.
(“Ghazal” 1997)
A Muslim and an Urdu speaker, Ali draws on the lyric poetry tradition of the ghazal while joining it with Western poetic influences, including the sounds and rhythms of the English language and a quotation from Dickinson in the third stanza. His range of conventions, covering two very different poetic traditions, is truly multicultural.
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