What Marlene Mountain Got Wrong About 5-7-5


This article by Marlene Mountain has had a big influence on my thinking about how the Japanese haiku form of 5-7-5 morae relates to the possibilities of how much we can import this form into our own language. I have long thought that she has made a very cognizant and clear cut case how a 5-7-5 syllable pattern doesn’t really work in English. Now, however, I’ve changed my mind about this.

Mountain’s argument is compelling because she gives concrete examples of how our speech pattern will always slide into fitting an extra syllable in to reach an even number of them, thus making the three line 17 syllable form an impractical one in English.

This example she gave, I think, is simply brilliant:

five five five five five
seven seven seven sev
five five five five five

When I read this I find myself completely out of breath at the end of the second line, I lose breath so fast that it feels that I have blown out air like a tire that’s run over nail. So, I am left to conclude that a 5-7-5 pattern does have a breathing pothole in it that I only can deal with by falling into an unnatural speech pattern to get through the the whole three lines.

One of the things that free verse has taught us, and something that perhaps metrical verse never could, is that indentation and line spacing does make us read lines differently than when they are normally squared to the left of the page on top of one another. And, of course, the lines of this example are squared and on top of each other, so what happens if I indent the second line?

five five five five five
 seven seven seven sev
five five five five five

For what ever reason spacial relationships has on the way we read the printed page, the second line seems very manageable now, I can glide through the ‘sev’ at the end of line two and slide into the third line with no hesitation, probably because the indentation makes me take a natural pause at the end of the first line. How about changing which line to indent?

five five five five five
seven seven seven sev
 five five five five five
 five five five five five
seven seven seven sev
five five five five five

Even when I indent the other two lines, I am able to navigate them pretty smoothly, so I now believe that 5-7-5 pattern is acceptable if one line is indented.

Another thing about Mountain’s example is that it has no punctuation, and punctuation marks are the street signs that tell us how and when to stop, so what happens when we put in some punctuation into the mix?

five five five five five:
seven seven seven sev
five five five five five

The colon lets me line up the five of the first line with the sev of the second line, which lets me naturally break onto the last line.

five five five five five
seven seven seven sev:
five five five five five.

When it is on the second line, it makes me naturally stop without blowing up, so I can move onto the third line in a smooth manner.

I’m not going to give anymore examples using other punctuation marks because I do think that this shows that with indentation and proper punctuation 5-7-5 becomes a very viable poetic pattern. Mountain’s example only proves it is impossible to write in a three line 5-7-5 syllable form if that you ignore any protocols of poetic variation or normal standard punctuation. If you don’t choose to follow her minimalistic example, I seems that you can do something smoothly in English by adopting it.

So, all the stuff I have written on this blog about 17 syllables not fitting the English language: it’s bunk.

Why Don’t We Say ‘Bad Big Wolf’??


When my Facebook friend shared this article by Mark Forsyth, I read it with enjoyment because one of the things my long years as a teacher of English as a second language in a foreign country has taught me is that I didn’t really understand my own language until I had contact with people who were struggling to learn it. Which is to say my students have taught me a great deal about the ins and outs of speaking English. And it was nice to see Forsyth writing about how we actually use language without haven’t much detailed knowledge about the inner workings of it.

The problem I had with the article was that while Forsyth tells us about the unspoken rules we have, he never goes into why we have these rules in the first place. He does tell us what the rules about ablaut reduplication are, yet he never delves into why of them. My long years as an ESL teacher, and yes thanks to the myriad of questions I’ve gotten from students about why things are said they way they are, I naturally start asking myself what the basis of having such linguistic rules are in the first place.

To understand the why for the rules of ablaut reduplication in English you have to understand what rhyme is, which Forsyth obviously shows he doesn’t understand when he tells that this limerick ‘has no rhymes’:

There was a young man from Dundee
Got stung on the leg by a wasp
When asked does it hurt
He said, ‘Yes, it does.
‘I’m so glad it wasn’t a hornet.’

Although the above has no ‘perfect rhymes’, it does have something called ‘slant rhymes.’ A good explanation of a slant rhyme is on this website:

Slant rhymes (sometimes called imperfect, partial, near, oblique, off etc.) Rhyme in which two words share just a vowel sound (assonance – e.g. “heart” and “star”) or in which they share just a consonant sound (consonance – e.g. “milk” and “walk”).

In the limerick above ‘wasp’ and ‘does’ are slant rhymes that are playing off the linguistic similarities that ‘wASp” and and ‘dOES’ share because the ‘s’ in ‘wasp’ deadens and softens the bite we usually say when speaking a ‘p’, (the ‘p’ in the word ‘warp’, for example, isn’t soft) and the ‘does’ as a verb vocalizes the ‘oe’ towards the sound of an ‘a’ rather than the ‘o’ which we do when we are talking about female deer in the plural. So this is an assonance slant rhyme. The words ‘hurt’ and ‘hornet’ are slant rhymes because the share the same end consonant sound of ‘t’.

Forsyth writing that the ‘rhymes aren’t as important as the rhythm’ is, well, wrong. These slant rhymes still slide the reader into the rhythm of the words, just like limericks that have perfect rhymes do, because even slant rhymes anchor the end of their lines and by doing so tie them together with the other rhyme.

Now, turning to why ‘big bad wolf’ is what we say rather than ‘bad big wolf’, the reason is because of an another type of rhyme, called ‘alliteration’ or ‘head rhyme’, which matches initial consonant sounds.

‘Big bad’ sets up an alliteration because the sound of the ‘b’ in both of them match each other. However, when we turn the words around and say ‘bad big’, the head rhyme between the two is lost because the ‘b’ in ‘bad’ is no longer pronounced the same as it is in ‘big’. The way the ‘g’ in ‘big’ is pronounced allows us to smack our lips for the ‘b’ in ‘bad’ the same way we have ready done on the first ‘b’. However, when the words are reversed, the ‘d’ of ‘bad’ gets in the way of the lip smacking and we don’t pronounce the second ‘b’ quite the same as the first one now, thus breaking the head rhyme and killing the alliteration.

(Of course, if we take a breath pause after saying ‘bad’ we can reload and make ‘big’ match up the head rhyme, but it is impossible to do if we keep it in a natural speech rhythm.)

All the other examples that Forsyth gave (‘clip-clop’, ‘zig-zag’, ‘crisis-cross’ etc.) are something called pararhyme, which is the type of rhyming that occurs when all the consonants in the two words match. As above, once we turn the word order around, the pararhyme disappears. ‘Clop-clip’ no longer rhymes because we neither speak the ‘cl’ nor the ‘p’ of both words the same because the switching of the vowels has made it impossible for us to do so. The ‘o’ forces us to smack so heavily on the ‘p’ following it that we shorten the way we pronounce ‘clip’ coming after it to the point where it no longer rhymes with ‘clop’ because we have to work the sound of the ‘i’ into the mechanics of our mouth.

Forsyth’s rules start to have meaning for us when we understand that speaking is the physical act of our mouth, our lips and our tongue working in concert, and because of this there are physical limitations to how we can fit the sounds of our language together. Sure, the patterns of language changes, we certainly don’t talk like people in Chaucer’s days did, probably because in the end we always are trying to find smoother ways to fit our thoughts into language. But acquiring this smoothness takes generations of time, just as it takes time for anyone to build up any muscular part of their body.

I don’t think we have to over think why Little Richard never sang ‘Tall Long Sally’, but even this should remind us how rhyme really is a part of the English language, and it is a part of it in ways which we often aren’t very aware of. And it reveals something that we as native speakers innately understand: that the same word can be pronounced differently depending on where you place it in relation to other words. It is the heritage of speaking a stress timed language. And who knows, maybe in the future people will develop a stress pattern so ‘bad big’ will come out as a rhyme in a natural rhythm??

A Famous Buson Haiku: Is It ‘Kite’ or ‘Kites’?


One of the peculiarities of the Japanese language is that while it’s does have a plural form for nouns it almost never gets used, mainly because the context that speaker is in dictates if they mean more than one of something. This gets a little tricky when it comes to reading haiku because the reader isn’t in the same physically present context as the speaker. And this haiku by Yosano Buson is a good example of it:

Ikanobori/ kinou no sora no aridokoro

Kites Yesterday’s sky’s having place.

Kites have been in Japan since the 600s when the were imported from China and in the past they were used in many ways as symbols of good luck and talismans for good fortune. Nowadays, we tend to think of kites as something children enjoy, but in the Edo era adults enjoyed them as well. Besides flying them as omens, kite fighting was something that people pursed with enthusiasm as well. Kites became so popular that the Edo government finally banned them except during the o-shougatsu holiday (the few days before and after New Years Day).

The banning of kites caused a problem for haiku. Kites as a “kigo” (season word) were listed as something done in spring, but with what is the now metropolis of Tokyo having forced the flying of them into the New Years’ holiday, the “kigo” had to accommodate that as well. Any seasonal reference books for haiku (‘Saijiki”) are in five volumes, four for the seasons and the extra one for the New Years period which is the most important religious holiday of the Japanese calendar. The old “Saijiki” I have has a double listing for kites, one in spring and the other for the New Year. However, the practice now is to only have kites listed as something done in spring.

Understanding the history of kites in Japan is important in the context of reading plurals into this haiku because, as anyone who lives long enough in Japan learns, there is a right date and a wrong date for everything. My wedding, for example, ending up being on a Tuesday instead of the more preferable Saturday because of it being a more auspicious day, or as it got explained to me “Saturday is no good because it is a bad Buddha day.”

Having good days and bad days makes religious things a bit more communal because people will always do things on good days. So, if someone wants to fly a kite as an omen of something then they would necessarily do it on a good day and not a bad one, meaning that there will be more than one person out flying kites on the good days. Since kites could only be flown during a short period of the year in Edo, probably not longer than a week, then there will be hordes of people out flying them before the ban kicks in again,

The point I am trying to make is that it is hard to read this haiku and not think of there being more than one kite up in the sky and that Buson was actually implying the plural here. The Nihon Daisaijiki, a large full color “saijiki” published about ten years ago, discusses this haiku and states this about the number of kites:

This doesn’t have to necessarily refer to the whole of the sky. It indicates the scene of a part of the sky that has one, or more likely, several kites in it.


Above is the picture that is included in this book under the heading of kites. Because is a wood block print, you can’t say that it is of the whole sky, but it is a part of the sky that has several kites floating in it.

Even when a commentator wants to you read this as being about only one kite, they have to couch it in terms of other kites in the sky. A book titled “Haiku Daikan” published by Meiji Shoin explains it like this:

There aren’t a large number of kites flying in the sky. In the very least, there are no other kites nearby this one, to follow this instruction to its obvious conclusion, there is a solitary one afloat.

Asking the reader to follow this instruction is a dead give away that the writer automatically assumes that the reader is reading the plural for kites.

I don’t find the argument for a single, or actually separated, kite very compelling because it makes the image a very personal one, which is exactly how at the end this commentator reads the symbolism of the kites:

It seems that the loneliness of human existence is suggested with this kite, sadness and at the same time a kind of fond remembrance is to be felt in this expression.

Whenever we feel fondness and sadness at the same time it means we are becoming nostalgic about something. It’s easy to understand how Buson would get nostalgic about his childhood from a kite, but I’d argue that the experience of flying a kite rather than watching one is what would more likely trigger the flood of emotion that would bring the bittersweet memories argued for above. I think it is next to impossible to read that Buson is flying this kite because I don’t think he would be able to make the topographical description of them being in the same spot as they were yesterday if he was.

The commentator in the Daisaijiki makes this conclusion about the haiku

Everything is calm and peaceful, indeed, there is a deepness to the feeling of the mild spring. Getting that as a scene, the impression in a person’s mind too will surely be similar.

This reading has the scene influencing the feelings in the writer, it’s a lovely spring day and people are enjoying it by going out with their kites and the scene has Buson feeing relaxed and secure about life. The immediate problem with this reading is that there aren’t any emotional markers in the haiku to expresses the “feeling” that the commentator mentions. In haiku, particles of speech are how the writer attaches personal emotions onto images, but in this haiku Buson didn’t use any. If he was feeling the mild spring so deeply you’d expect that there would be a particle used somewhere to express it.

Japanese is my second language, and, so sure, there might be a nuance in this haiku that I am unable to catch because I’m not a native speaker, but for me the lack of a particle shows that Buson is being intellectual rather than emotional here. Saying that the kites are in the same spot as yesterday is not a visceral reaction to the scene, rather it is a measured logical one.

Therefore, the symbolism for me becomes a little more generic and less personal. Instead of being a privatized experience, I tend to see this as a universal one. Everyone has flown a kite or watched kites in flight sometime during their life. Besides the universality, kite flying is also a timeless enterprise. How long have people been flying them? Although the popularity of kites wane, somebody somewhere still enjoys flying them. The kite designs are timeless as well, kites patterned after those made in the Edo era still fly as true today as they did back then, and I’m sure that the even older designs will still be able take to the air.

So, with ‘timelessness’ as the optimum idea in my mind:

    in the spot
        of sky 
           they were  
               in yesterday.

The problem with this literal translation is that the Japanese language doesn’t need adjectives to fill scenes for the reader because connotations between words implies scenes that don’t need to be openly stated. Unfortunately, in English, we need adjectives to paint the scene, and since we use sound as a way to imply emotions, adjectives are also the means of achieving syntax as well.

Kites aloft....
      in the same exact 
              spot of 
                clear sky 
            they wafted in yesterday.

All I have done is put in some adjectives around the images and use a verb that adds a descriptive element rather than a nondescript one. I don’t think I have impinged in on what is in the original is by doing this.

Kobayashi Issa’s Mist: Haiku or Senryu?




san mon ga kasumi minikeri toomegane



Lanoue gives this translation and comment:

for three pennies
nothing but mist…



three pennies’ worth
of haze -that’s all I see
through this telescope






Broad Daylight on Yushima Shrine’s Viewing Platform…….

Only three coins
but I did
see the
unseen mist!
The telescope.











Haiku: A Form Not A Style

(photo courtesy of Kayoko Sato)





The first is by Matsuo Basho:

On the wide seashore
a stray blossom and the shells
make one drifting sand.



Nami no ma ya kogai ni majiru hagi no chiri

“Nami” is “wave”
“ma” means “interval” or “pause”
“Kogai” is “small shells”
“ni” is “in” or “at”

To put this into a more poetic form:

The pauses between waves! 
Pink bush clover 
with the small shells. 








White, sifted mountain 
reverberates in the eyes 
of a dragonfly 


Touyama ga medama ni utsuru tonbo kana

“Touyama” is “distant mountain”
“medama” is “eyeballs
“ni” is “in”
“utsuru” is verb meaning “reflect”
“tondo” is “dragonfly”
“kana” is an interjection that is exclamation

The mountains far 
are reflected 
in their 
the dragonflies! 
















