What Is a Haiku? Seventeen Syllables and What Goes Into Them

In Japanese a haiku is a single vertical line of seventeen sound units, divided by rhythm into groups of five, seven and five. Japanese sound units are shorter than English syllables, so an English haiku of seventeen syllables says considerably more than a Japanese one, and many English writers use fewer. The three-line layout is a Western convention for showing the three groups.

Two further rules matter more than the count. A traditional haiku contains a kigo, a season word, that places the moment in the year: cherry blossom for spring, the moon for autumn, frogs for spring again. And it contains a kireji, a cutting word, a syllable that acts like punctuation and divides the poem into two parts that are set against each other. In English the cut is usually a dash, a colon, or simply a line break. The poem works by the jump between the two parts.

The haiku began as the opening verse of a much longer collaborative form, the renga, in which poets took turns adding linked stanzas. The first stanza, the hokku, set the season and the scene, and by the seventeenth century poets were composing hokku to stand alone. Basho, a former samurai's servant who spent his later life travelling on foot and writing, made it a serious art; Yosa Buson, a painter, gave it visual precision in the eighteenth century; and Kobayashi Issa, who lost his family and wrote about flies and snails, gave it tenderness in the early nineteenth. The name haiku was fixed by Masaoka Shiki in the 1890s, who also argued that the form should describe what the poet actually saw.

The West met haiku through translations around 1900, and the Imagist poets, Ezra Pound above all, took from it the idea that a poem could be a single image with no moral attached. Pound's two-line In a Station of the Metro, faces in a crowd set against petals on a wet black bough, is a haiku in everything but the count.

A haiku does not explain, compare or conclude. It sets down two perceptions and trusts the gap between them. In Basho's frog poem the first part is a still, ancient pond and the second is a sudden small sound, and the meaning, if it must be stated, is something about stillness and the moment that breaks it and what remains after. Stating it is exactly what the poem declines to do. The reader completes the poem, which is why a good haiku can be read many times.

The season word does similar work in compressed form. Because Japanese readers carry an inherited set of associations for each season, a single word summons a whole mood, so the poet need not describe the loneliness of autumn; the word for autumn wind does it. English lacks the shared code, which is one reason English haiku often feel thinner and why translators argue about every word.

Most haiku written in English classrooms fail in the same ways, and the failures are instructive:

• •Counting syllables and stopping: seventeen syllables of description with no cut and no turn is a sentence, not a haiku
• •Explaining the feeling: the moment should carry it; the word sad has no place in a sad haiku
• •Using metaphor: haiku presents things as themselves, a frog as a frog
• •Choosing a grand subject: the form is for the small and particular, a snail on a gatepost, not the meaning of life
• •Filling the three lines evenly: the poem needs a break, with one part answering or undercutting the other

The practical method is to notice before writing. Pay attention to something small and actual, this morning's frost on a car roof, a bus pulling away with someone running for it, and write down what was there, not what it made you think. Then find the second thing, the detail that sat beside the first and belonged to a different scale or sense, and put them together with a break between. Trim every word that explains. Then count, and adjust the count last. Basho's advice to his students was to learn about the pine from the pine, and about the bamboo from the bamboo, and it is still the whole instruction.

Many of the short, funny three-line poems people share as haiku are, strictly speaking, something else: senryu. A senryu uses the same compact shape of five, seven and five sound units, but instead of nature and the seasons it looks at people, their habits, vanities and small embarrassments. It usually has no season word, and it is allowed to be openly witty or satirical, where a haiku keeps its feelings implied. The form takes its name from Karai Senryu, an eighteenth-century editor in Edo, the old name for Tokyo, who judged popular verse competitions and published collections of the best entries.

Knowing the difference helps you read and write both forms better. A poem about a cat knocking a cup off a table to watch your face is a senryu; a poem about frost on the cat's whiskers at dawn is heading towards haiku. Neither is the lesser form, and Japanese newspapers and magazines still run senryu columns where readers poke fun at office life, family quarrels and politics. If your attempt at a haiku keeps turning into a joke about human behaviour, you may simply have written a good senryu, and it is worth calling it by its proper name.

In Japanese, Basho's poem reads furuike ya, kawazu tobikomu, mizu no oto. Count the sound units and the pattern appears: fu-ru-i-ke-ya is five, ka-wa-zu-to-bi-ko-mu is seven, mi-zu-no-o-to is five. The little word ya at the end of the first phrase is a cutting word, one of the most common, and it works something like an exclamation mark or a pause for breath: old pond, and then a stop. Kawazu, frog, is the season word, and the last phrase literally says water's sound, a noun phrase with no verb, so the poem ends on a thing rather than an action.

Much of what an English reader receives depends on choices the translator has to make. Japanese nouns do not normally mark number, so the original never says whether one frog jumps or several. Lafcadio Hearn, one of the first to translate the poem, wrote frogs jumped in, turning a single sharp splash into a series of them and moving the moment into the past, although the Japanese verb is in a plain present form. Setting several published versions side by side is a good exercise for anyone writing haiku, because it shows how much weight each small decision carries in so few words.

Basho's most famous work is not a single poem but a journey. In 1689 he and his companion Sora set out on foot from Edo into the remote north of Japan's main island, covering some 2,400 kilometres in about five months, and he turned the trip into Oku no Hosomichi, usually translated as The Narrow Road to the Deep North. It mixes short passages of prose with haiku, a combination called haibun. At the old battlefield of Hiraizumi he writes of summer grasses as all that remains of warriors' dreams, and at a mountain temple he hears the shrill of cicadas seeping into the rocks.

The prose and the poems do different jobs. The prose sets the scene plainly, with places, weather and the people met on the road, and the haiku does not repeat it but steps sideways into a single perception, so the jump that a cut makes inside a haiku now happens across the whole page. Haibun is still written today, in Japanese and in English, and it is a useful exercise if your haiku keep explaining themselves. Write a short paragraph about a place or an afternoon, put all the facts and context there, and let a final three-line poem carry only the moment the paragraph could not.

A haiku is a three-part poem of about seventeen syllables that presents one moment, traditionally in nature and marked with a season word, and turns on a cut that sets two perceptions against each other without explanation. Descended from the opening verse of linked Japanese poetry and shaped by Basho, it works through what it leaves out, and the syllable count is the last thing to worry about.