Matsuo Basho in
Paris:
The Influence of haiku on Ezra Pound’s
poem In a Station of the Metro
Ezra Pound’s In a Station of the Metro is seen by many
as being one of the first instances of Western haiku. Lucien
Stryk says in his Introduction to the Penguin Book of Zen
Poetry:
“To give an idea of the way haiku work, without making
odious cultural comparisons, here is Ezra Pound’s “In
a Station of the Metro”, perhaps the most admired (and
for good reason) haiku-like poem in English.”[1]
Pound himself gives a further insight into the nature of influence
for the poem in his article on Vorticism of 1914:
“The "one image poem" is a form of super-position,
that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another. I found
it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been
left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and
destroyed it because it was what we call work "of second
intensity." Six months later I made a poem half that
length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence:
--
"The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals, on a wet, black bough."[2]
”
This essay attempts to look at Pound’s poem in the light
of Japanese haiku and examines the way in which Pound used
and, in some ways, misused translation to develop new directions
in poetry and poetics that produced firstly, Imagism and through
this influenced Modernism and subsequent American and World
poetry.
In a Station of the Metro, first published in 1913 represents
in many ways Pound’s burgeoning interest in Sino-Japanese
poetry and poetics that would find ultimate expression in
the collection Cathay, a part translation based on the notes
of Sinologist Ernest Fenollosa. In Cathay Pound explored his
notions of translation and original composition, blurring
the line between the two in what we could call an “original
translation”.
In In a Station of the Metro we can discern the very beginnings
of this idea and we can also examine, in microcosm, what Pound
was to do, not only with the Chinese of Li Po but the French
of the Troubador poets, the latin of Sextus Propertius and
later on, in various languages in The Cantos.
Firstly, let us examine what Pound called the “bilateral”
nature of his poem and haiku:
“The hokku is the Jap's test. If le style c'est l'homme,
the writer's blood test is his swift contraposition of objects.
Most hokkus are bilateral.”
Pound here identifies, of course the nature of the central
juxtaposition of images that makes his poem so startling and
modern. Rejecting the use of overt metaphor, Pound instead
contrapositions the two images, of the “petals on the
wet black bough” and the amorphous faces in the Metro
station, in order to produce what Makoto Ueda called the “technique
of Surprising Comparison”. We see this in the early
work of haiku master Matsuo Basho:
Ki no kirite motokuchi miru ya kyo no tsuki
Chopping the tree
I gaze at the end –
Tonight’s moon! [3]
And also in Ichikawa Danjuro I’s :
Shigamitsuku satogo ya toko no kirigirisu
A cricket under
My bed, O my clinging
Foster children
Here we can see clearly where, through translation Pound
developed the notion of image juxtaposition that features
so prominently in In a Station of the Metro. In all of these
poems, the two images are brought together in order satisfy
a larger, poetical whole. The poetry in Pound’s poem
as well Basho’s is due to the success of this “surprising
comparison”. If it is successful as it is here, the
reader can, not only witness and be involved in the scene
visually but also partake in the emotional response of the
poet. We understand Pound’s impetus in his writing of
the poem, we understand his sense of beatific agoraphobia,
we can witness his moment of realization just as we witness
Basho’s or understand Ichikawa Danjuro I’s longing
for his foster children.
Pound, in his poem not only juxtaposes the image of the faces
with the image of petals but also the image of the city with
the image of the country. The busyness of the Metro station
with its crowds of faces jostling for space is contrasted
with the ebullience of nature, providing a contrast between
20th Century modernity and a, mainly Japanese rural past.
We are reminded of similar lines in John Gould Fletcher:
“The winds came clanging and clattering
From long white highroads whipping in ribbons
up summits:
They strew upon the city gusty wafts of
apple-blossoms,” [4]
and also of T.S Eliot’s “breeding lilacs out of
the dead ground” .[5]
Pound uses, in his exploration of Japanese poetics, the Kereji,
or “cutting word”. In In a Station of the Metro,
as many haiku in translation, this is symbolized by the use
of the colon “:”. The Kereji in Pound’s
poem shifts the focus of the reader’s attention from
one image to the other. It provides, as R.H Blyth says:
“a kind of poetical punctuation…by which the composer
of the haiku expresses, or hints at, or emphasizes his mood
and soul state.” [6]
Pound, by combining the two images, and bisecting them with
the Kereji makes not only a poetical, Imagistic statement
but also an emotional one encouraging the reader to make the
comparison between the two concrete images. The Kereji gives
the poem a philosophical dimension without ever having to
directly or overtly state the relationship. We can note a
similar device employed in many Japanese haiku, for instance
in Yosa Buson’s:
Mizu tori ya koboko no ataru ni ka futa cho
Water bird;
The dead tree in the middle
Of two rickshaws
Here, the Kereji, “ya” is translated as a semi
colon but fulfills the same literary function as Pound’s
“:” in:
“The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals, on a wet, black bough”
The Kereji provides the fulcrum of the poetic line in both
Pound and Buson allowing there to be comparison without ever
needing to state directly. In this Pound is using Japanese
and haiku poetics directly, borrowing from one culture but
always managing to create something that is quintessentially
modern, the simple bilateral imagery providing a stark pre-war
statement on post Victorian literature. These people, faceless
and multiple, milling on the platform, have both an ugliness
and a beauty that is in itself thoroughly modern.
Pound, in this way not only recognizes the aesthetics of
haiku but uses them as well. Paul B. Armstrong in his book
Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation
states:
“The power of this image is due in large part to the
surprise of the comparison. The connection between these seemingly
unrelated terms is a blank we are challenged to fill. An anonymous
mass of commuters is, at first glance, not at all like leaves
on a damp branch--although, on second thought, they are indeed
similar enough that we can find ways of joining them that
are not farfetched (perhaps picturing featureless white and
pink faces clustered together like petals on a flowering tree
and imagining the day as dark and damp, as if it had just
rained).” [7][8]
Armstrong expounds upon his reader-response theory of In a
Station of The Metro suggesting that the poems beauty lies
in the reader’s creativity in not only connecting the
two images but of deciding upon their validity:
“The consistency of Pound's figure is the product of
the reader's imagination.”
It is only through examining Pound’s poem in the light
of Japanese aesthetics and poetics though that, I think, we
can fully reach an understanding.
At the turn of the century there were many translators working
on haiku, Lafcadio Hearne’s Japanese Lyrics, William
G. Aston’s History of Japanese Literature, and Basil
Hall Chamberlin’s Japanese Poetical Epigrammes were
all in print around the time Pound would have writing In a
Station of the Metro and developing what was to become the
Anglo-Japanese aesthetic of Imagism.
It is interesting to note that Pound uses the term “hokku”
for haiku in all of his correspondence [9]and
essays. Haiku, as a word was invented or at least made popular
by the haiku poet Shiki during the latter stages of the 19th
Century. At this time haiku was being reinvented after a long
hiatus and, in many ways, Shiki coined the term in order to
symbolize that reinvention. The term Hokku was, however used
by Basho, Buson and other Edo and Tokugawa Period poets.
It is, perhaps an irony that Ezra Pound was creating a modern
Western poetic out of what was, at the time seen in Japan
as an altogether medieval Japanese poetic. Even in Basho’s
time the notion of the “surprising comparison”
that Ueda recognizes in Basho and Armstrong recognizes in
Pound was considered as somewhat frivolous and fit mainly
for court humor. Basho himself dedicated only a few years
of his writing career to this technique before progressing
to favoring haiku writing containing Wabi, Sabi and other
Zen inspired aesthetics.
“as the years went by, Basho came to write more and
more serious poetry, freeing himself from the prevailing trend
of humorous Danrin-style poetry” [10]
There is, however an element of Pound’s poem belonging
to Japanese aesthetics that, perhaps, even Pound did not appreciate.
It was Basho who first introduced the notion of Sabi and its
sister notion of Wabi into haiku. Taken from the painting
of Sesshu and the Cha No Yu of Rikyu, Sabi and Wabi have often
times been translated as “loneliness”, “poverty”,
“witheredness”, “remotness” and other
terms that come close but do not quite capture the spirit
of this aesthetic.
Blyth characterizes Sabi in Haiku as:
“Sabishisa , loneliness, is the haiku equivalent of
Mu in Zen, a state of absolute spiritual poverty in which,
having nothing we possess all.” [11]
And Horst Hammitzsch describes Wabi as:
“incomplete, show(ing) no self will and no desire for
perfection.” [12]
And it is by taking these two definitions together that we
begin to glean some idea of the nature of Wabi and Sabi in
haiku and, ipso facto in In a Station of the Metro. We see
how, in Pound’s poem the faces are mere apparitions,
not existing and yet existing, there is a sadness to the poem,
a loneliness that goes beyond the here and now and resides
in the eternal. It is the ennui of a poet writing after the
watershed of the Victorian era, desperate for new influences,
new vistas, new voices and ways of expression.
We see the “black bough” and how it mirrors the
imperfect loneliness of Yosa Buson’s:
Kitsune hi ya dokuro ni ame no tamaru yoru ni
The fox,
Collecting skulls
In the evening rain.Or Honeshiba no karare nagare mo ko no
me kana
Brushwood skeleton
Withering whilst
A new tree grows.
This is the spirit of Wabi Sabi that exists in Pound’s
poem. This withered-ness that underlines many haiku poems.
Pound captures this perfectly in his “Petals, on a wet,
black bough”. It is the wetness and the blackness that
lifts Pound’s imagery from mere image for image sake
into something that rivals Japanese haiku.
But what of the misuse of translation we spoke of in the introduction
to this piece? What of the ways in which Pound misunderstands
haiku? Lucien Stryk, again in his essay points out some of
them:
“”The apparition of these”, though sonorous
enough, add nothing. Nor does the reference to the crowd,
metro stations usually being crowded – besides, the
petals of the simile would make that clear.” [13]
Stryk suggests a haiku-isation of Pound’s poem:
“Faces in the metro-
petals
on a wet black bough.”
Suggesting that Pound’s poem, after revision and editing,
was not brief enough. There is too much information, Stryk
suggests, too many words that confuse and obfuscate the transference
of the images. For it to be a haiku the transference between
poet and reader should be the ultimate poetic force. In Pound’s
poem this is undoubtedly hampered by the ego of the poet,
the poeticizing of the image. Basho says in his essay The
Records of a Travel-worn Satchel:
“Whatever such a mind sees a flower, and whatever such
a mind dreams of is the moon. It is only a barbarous mind
that sees other than the flower, merely an animal mind that
dreams of other than the moon. The first lesson for the artist
is, therefore, to learn how to overcome such barbarism and
animality, to follow nature, to be one with nature.”
[14]
It is this oneness that we find in the best haiku and we find
missing in Pound. If we examine such haiku as Buson’s
Furudera no fuji asamashiki ochiba kana
Old temple
Wisteria – looking sad
With leaves fallen.
Or Basho’s famous death verse:
Tabi ni yande yumi wa kareno o kakemeguru
Traveling in sickness
My dreams in a desolate field
Wandering on.
We can see this oneness, we feel the poet’s interaction
not only with nature but with their nature. Buson can empathize
with the wisteria’s loneliness and sadness, Basho understand
the desolation of the field in Autumn as he lies dying on
his bed, after a journey. In Pound, I think, we note the detachment
of a poet describing a scene without ever truly understanding
the nature of that scene, or more rightly the importance.
The Zen inspired writers of haiku would have appreciated the
interconnectivity of not only themselves with their poetic
subject but their subject with its surroundings and, indeed,
all things. Basho writes of the “desolate” or
“withered” field because it is the desolation
or witheredness of all things, it is their Wabi Sabi. Harold
Stewart writes of this in his book A Net of Fireflies: Japanese
Haiku and Haiku Paintings:
“Since it is inherent in Reality itself and accords
with the changeless Principles, the sacred science of symbols
requires no conscious contrivance of allegory. It is enough
for it to exert its latent action of presence, without overt
mention or explicit development, to give the poem its metaphysical
dimension and spiritual resonance. These ideas find a Chinese
parallel in the First Pictorial Canon of Hsieh Ho.”
[15]
We could not, perhaps expect Pound to appreciate the fullness
of this mainly Zen ideal but, in many ways, this ideal of
interconnectivity is the basis of the success or failure of
haiku. The yardstick of haiku is not merely the concrete-ness
of the image, nor even the way in which the poet combines
two surprising images but the degree of emotional transference
between poet and reader. We need only think of Basho’s:
Matsushima ya a Matsushima ya Matsushimaya
Matsushima!
A Matsushima!
Matsushima!
To see that this, can sometimes negate words and move over,
quite literally into wordlessness. Here Basho uses only 3
words to describe the beauty of the scenery at the of the
islands and seas of Matsushima and yet we understand the poem’s
intentions fully and are not mislead by the poet into thinking
that he, the creator is in any way more important than the
inspiration. In this way haiku is a hand on the chest of the
poet, feeling the beat of their heart directly through our
fingertips.
This, I think is the nature of haiku and this is what we note
as missing from Pound. This quality of transference, this
ego-less concern with the subject. In Pound we witness a poet
creating, in Basho a poet experiencing, for it is in the discernment
of the image that the haiku poet creates, not necessarily
in thewriting of the poem.
Pound’s poem, in this way, adopts the dress and style
of haiku without ever fully appreciating or taking onboard
the deeper significance. Perhaps that is why Pound managed
to create Imagism from them and others what we think of today
as Western haiku. For Pound the image was the thing, it was
the concrete-ness of the image, the picture above all else.
For haiku writers like Basho and Buson, the image is only
ever successful if it reveals something about, not only the
poet but the reader as well. As R.H Blyth says:“Basho
gives us the same feeling of depth as Bach, and by the same
means, not by noise and emotion as in Beethoven and Wagner,
but by a certain serenity and “expressivness”
which never aims at beauty butoften achieves it as it were
by accident.” [16]It
is always dangerous to study one culture’s Art with
another’s aesthetics. What has been created under one
set of auspices should not necessarily be made to fit under
another’s. This can sometimes lead to what Styrk describes
as “odious comparisons” but by doing so with Pound’s
In a Station of the Metro, I think we can not only discern
interesting notions about Pound’s poem but also how
he adopted some ideals and rejected or was unaware of others.
By doing this, we have seen, he managed to create something
in Western poetry that was as different as it was influential.
This is, perhaps one of Pound’s most anthologized poems
and rightly so. The irony of this being that it went on to
influence a whole host of world poets, some of them Japanese.
Kinoshita Yuji’s Late summer has something of nature
of Pound within it:
“The pumpkin tendrils creep
along the station platform. A ladybird peeps
From a chink in the half closed flowers.” [17]
As I said in the introduction to this piece, Pound was to
continue with these ideals, of adopt and change in his later
book Cathay, but in many ways as we have seen this started
with In a Station of the Metro. There is no way of knowing
just how well Pound knew haiku, he mentions them several times
in his letters and essays but never to what extent he read
or knew of haiku poets. It is obvious though that Pound had,
at least a superficial knowledge of the workings of haiku
if not the Zen inspired spiritual foundations. In this way
he managed to forge a new Western aesthetic from a medieval
Japanese past and through this, to change and influence Japanese
poets of the future.
- Lucien Stryk, Introduction, The Penguin
Book of Zen Poetry, (Penguin, 1977), p.23[Return]
- Ezra Pound, Vorticism, The Fortnightly
Review 571, Sept 1st 1914[Return]
- Basho adds further comparisons with his
use of the kanji kuchi ””, “mouth”.
[Return]
- John Gould Fletcher, Irradiations[Return]
- T.S Eliot, The Wasteland[Return]
- R.H Blyth, Haiku Volume 1: Eastern Culture,
(Hokuseido Press, 1949), p.377[Return]
- Paul. B Armstrong, Conflicting Readings:
Variety and Validity in Interpretation, (Carolina Press,
1990) p.83[Return]
- Mr. Armstrong however makes no note of
the influence on Japanese Literature on this poem. [Return]
- See Pound/Ford: The Story of a Literary
Friendship, p.52[Return]
- Makoto Ueda, Matsuo Basho, (Kodansha,
1970) p. 42[Return]
- Blyth, p.172[Return]
- Horst Hammitzsch, Zen in the Art of the
Tea Ceremony, (Penguin, 1979), p. 71[Return]
- Stryk, p.24[Return]
- Matsuo Basho, Records of a travel Worn
Satchel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and OtherTravel
Sketches, trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa, (Penguin, 1966), p.72 [Return]
- Harold Stewart, A Net of Fireflies: Japanese
Haiku and Haiku Paintings, (Tuttle, 1960), p.121[Return]
- R.H Blyth, Haiku Volume 4: Autumn Winter,
(Hokuseido Press, 1952) p.iii[Return]
- Kinoshita Yuji, Late Summer, The Penguin
Book of Japanese Verse, trans. Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony
Thwaite, (Penguin, 1966) p.226[Return]
- BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Armstrong, Paul B, Conflicting Readings: Variety
and Validity in Interpretation, (Carolina Press, 1990)
- Basho, Matsuo, Records of a travel Worn Satchel,
The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other
- Travel Sketches, trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa, (Penguin,
1966)
- Blyth, R.H, Haiku Volume 1: Eastern Culture, (Hokuseido
Press, 1949)
- Blyth, R.H, Haiku Volume 4: Autumn Winter, (Hokuseido
Press, 1952)
- Eliot, T.S, Complete Poems and Plays, (Faber and
Faber, 1989)
- Hammitzsch, Horst, Zen in the Art of the Tea Ceremony,
(Penguin, 1979)
- Pound, Ezra, Personae: The Collected Poems of
Ezra Pound, (New Directions, 1990)
- Pound, Ezra and Ford Madox Ford, Pound/Ford: The
Story of a Literary Friendship, (Faber and Faber, 1982)
- Pound, Ezra, Selected Prose 1909-1965, (New Directions,
1973)
- Pound, Ezra, The Cantos, (Faber and Faber, 1989)
- Pound, Ezra, Guide to Kulchur (New Directions,
1970)
- Pound, Ezra, Vorticism, The Fortnightly Review
571, Sept 1st 1914
- Stewart, Harold, A Net of Fireflies: Japanese
Haiku and Haiku Paintings, (Tuttle, 1960)Stryk,
Lucien,
- Introduction, The Penguin Book of Zen Poetry,
(Penguin, 1977)
- The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse, trans. Geoffrey
Bownas and Anthony Thwaite, (Penguin, 1966)
- Ueda, Makoto, Matsuo Basho, (Kodansha, 1970)
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