Greg Bryant wrote and posted a fine haiku over at his site. I immediately caught the use of personification in it — giving a non-human object human traits. This, I had always read and been told, was one of the big no-nos in haiku, no matter how good the result might be.
Haiku (so I was taught) is the poetry of simply noticing and letting the reader draw his own conclusions. Simile, metaphor, personification, apostrophe, and all the other staples of Western poetry have no place in a form that seeks to describe in the plainest terms that which is.
But is that the case?
Peggy Willis Lyles reminds us that the masters used such literary devices occasionally. She discusses the use of kigo (season words) especially in Japanese haiku and how these words are made to stand for larger concepts than their simple connotations. She concludes that we may similarly safely use the common Western literary devices, but they should be used sparingly.
This article from the British Haiku Society supports the general shunning of personification, etc., and suggests that we patronize nature by reading human nature into it. But here, too, we discover a distaste for an ironclad prohibition on such haiku. We are also reminded of the differences between haiku and senryu, which many English-language haiku poets ignore. To me, that would appear to be a big strike against prescriptivism.
In answering a poet’s question about personification, Jane Reichhold notes that this is a sore spot in the haiku community. She lays out the arguments for and against personification and in the end comes down on the side of greater freedom.
Haiku is a Japanese poetry form. We in the Western world who have adopted it should give a certain deference to its origins and standard Japanese practices. But we are also informed by the poetry of our culture; there will naturally be some overlap, and I see no point in getting upset about that. I am drawn to haiku, in part, because it does not use standard Western literary devices. Still, when the poem is as good as Greg’s, clinging to a rule for the sake of clinging to a rule is foolish.
Any reader wishing to learn about haiku should click on the category “haiku” just above, at the end of Bryon’s post. It will assemble for you a blend of critical essays, links, and original haiku by Bryon that together will nest you comfortably in the center of understanding of English-language haiku and its roots. I have learned so much here.
So many good things to contemplate in this post! Here are some observations along the way:
— I’m wondering if removing the personification would actually improve my poem, despite your kind appreciation of it as it is. Consider:
— I have something to add to this:
I don’t think that’s the “only” distinction, but merely the most common definition, and it’s basically a remark on syntax, not figuration. I read once, somewhere, that simile asserts similarity, whereas metaphor asserts identity. This seems true, and it is a more profound distinction. It is why metaphor is both more compact and more powerful than simile. Power not only because it is compact, but because it goes further than simile and actually asserts something untrue. The reader whose imagination cannot reconstruct the implied simile behind a metaphor experiences nonsense.
Possibly this is why metaphor (and personification like I used, which is metaphorical in this respect) raises the question of suitability for haiku. Such an intrusive assertion as the identity of two mostly unlike things can overpower the gentle and passive spirit of haiku. I see why they should be used “sparingly.”
Greg, I think you’ve hit it exactly in your last graf above. Snow on tree limbs is snow on tree limbs. My mental tree may not look quite like the tree outside your window, but we can all get our heads around the idea and it’s a concrete thing. But something like
windy day-
nature shakes
off dandruff
referring to snow blowing off a limb is not seeing the thing for what it is. Never mind that it’s not clever; it’s imposing a layer of fiction on the fact of the snow and the wind and the tree.
As for your haiku, if the personification were to be removed, we could make it do double duty, which is something some of the best haiku do (but I don’t strain myself to get there every time):
deep in winter
snow covers
dormant limbs
That’s awfully rough, off the top of my head, but you get the straightforward snow-on-tree vision and also a little something about humans with winter a key word for the end of life and snow covering the limbs we no longer use after death.
I hadn’t thought of metaphor being more powerful than simile, but it’s fairly evident once it’s pointed out. That’s interesting to ponder and to think about how to use it. Or to think about how other people use it.