What Is a Haiku? Seventeen Syllables and What Goes Into Them
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
An old pond; a frog jumps in; the sound of water. Matsuo Basho's poem of 1686 is seventeen syllables in Japanese, describes something that takes half a second, and has been discussed for three centuries. A haiku is that: a very short poem, traditionally in three phrases of five, seven and five syllables, that presents a single moment of perception without comment and leaves the reader to feel what it means. The counting is the least important part.
The form
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.
Where it came from
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.
What the poem does
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.
Common mistakes
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
Writing one
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.
The takeaway
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.