HAIKU

The Longest Night

5 syllables

rainy weather

darkness- alone

On the rain-dark path

One wet Western Leopard Toad

My only comrade

7 syllables

toad- frog

one frog- one human

5 syllables

my only comrade- alone

comrade- person with you

do questions

Haiku was traditionally written in the present tense and focused on associations between images.

focusing on images from nature, haiku emphasizes simplicity, intensity, and directness of expression

Haiku began in thirteenth-century Japan as the opening phrase of renga, an oral poem, generally 100 stanzas long, which was also composed syllabically. The much shorter haiku broke away from renga in the sixteenth-century, and was mastered a century later by Matsuo Basho, who wrote this classic haiku:

HAIKU

POEM

STRUCTURE

A traditional Japanese haiku is a

three-line poem with seventeen syllables, written in a

5/7/5 syllable count.