Return to the current issue

|  Back  |  Next  |

THE WORLD HAIKU CLUB GOES TO THE LAKE DISTRICT 

 

 

Grassroots events of JAPAN 2001 are popping out and flowering all over the United Kingdom like daffodils through the snow, or cherry blossom in the spring wind!

A Haiku Workshop event led by WHC Chairman, Susumu Takiguchi, was held at Wordsworth House, Cockermouth, Cumbria, UK, on Friday 6 July 2001. WHC and Cockermouth Festival jointly presented an evening of writing and appreciating haiku in the very house where William Wordsworth was born on a spring day 231 years ago.

 

Wordsworth is loved in Japan not only by English poetry aficionados but also by haijin because of his deep understanding of the divine and man through his nature poems. It is extraordinary that over 300 years after the death of Matsuo Basho, haiku was practiced in this most English region.

An extract from the lecture follows:

 

---

 

Japan Meets Wordsworth

Susumu Takiguchi

 

Nature is very differently regarded in Japan from how she has been treated in the West. To put it another way, the Japanese perception of man in his relation with nature is different from that in the West, which comes to the same thing. In the most simplistic terms, man and nature are separate in the West whereas they are one in Japan.

Richard Dawkins, Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, says, in his recent book “Unweaving the Rainbow”, 1998 (Chapter 2 “Drawing Room of Dukes”) that “…poets …have overlooked the gold mine of inspiration offered by science.” In this connection, let us just say that science is the study of nature. Nature again is the key point.

He goes on to say that even W. H. Auden was “…missing the poetic possibilities of science itself”, quoting Auden, “… When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.” (The Dyer’s Hand, ‘Poet and the City’, 1963)

Dawkins asks, “Isn’t the speechless universe a worthy theme? Why would a poet celebrate only persons, and not the slow grind of natural forces that made them?”

Dawkins quotes Charles Darwin “…from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are, evolved. “ (On the Origin of Species 1859)

Also, quoting Blake’s quatrain:

“to see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour”

Auguries of Innocence, c.1803, William Blake

Dawkins comments on this by saying “The stanza can be read as all about science, all about standing in the moving spotlight, about taming space and time, about the very large built from the quantum graininess of the very small, a lone flower as a miniature of all evolution”

And he concludes that “The poetry is in the science.”

A similar thing was occurring in Japan, quite independently. Professor Shinichiro Tomonaga, Novel Prize winning mathematician, came to a halt in his research when he was tackling a mathematical problem. He was stuck, unable to go forward, backward or laterally. At about the same time, a well-known Japanese poet came to a standstill too, seemingly with all his inspiration exhausted or having deserted him. One day, these two distinguished men met and a miraculous interaction between them or exchange of inspiration took place. Consequently, the problems solved for both. The two realised that at such a level, mathematics cannot proceed without poetry and vice versa. One could say that science and poetry need each other and share a common ground.

---

Wordsworth is held to be the champion of nature poems. This could be confirmed by listening to the voices of his fellow nature poets.

John Clare (1793-1864)

To Wordsworth

Wordsworth I love, his books are like the fields,
...Not filled with flowers, but works of human kind;
The pleasant weed a fragrant pleasure yields,
...The briar and broomwood shaken by the wind,
The thorn and bramble o’er the water shoot
...A finer flower than gardens e’er gave birth,

. . .

I love to stoop and look among the weeds
...To find a flower I never knew before;

Wordsworth, go on – a greater poet be;
Merit will live, though parties disagree!

John Clare was of a farming stock and must have known nature well. He compared Wordsworth to the fields filled with works of human kind. This seems to me to be indicating that he saw, at least in Wordsworth, someone equating humans and nature. Also, as indicated from line 3 to line 6, not flowers grown in gardens, but weed, wild flowers and plants are chosen as the objects of poet’s admiration. This is very akin to the spirit of haiku.

To find a flower among the weeds the poet never knew before is very much like what haiku poets do.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

To Wordsworth

Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return;
Childhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.

. . .

In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty, --

. . .

It is clear what Shelley thought Wordsworth was, from the expression of “Poet of Nature” with the capital N. It is significant that he mentioned lost things which were all pertaining to human beings, which he thought Wordsworth as a nature poet missed. The “truth and liberty” may correspond to Basho’s “fuga-no-makoto” (poetic honesty, sincerity and truth) and the poetic freedom he sought through “karumi” (lightness).

What John Clare and Shelley said in verse can be  ascertained by the words by Wordsworth, and it has some parallel in a fundamental sense with the teachings of Basho. For example, Wordsworth said, “To be incapable of a feeling of poetry, in my sense of the word, is to be without love of human nature and reverence for God”. The poetry in his sense of the word includes, of course, nature poetry. So, the feeling of such poetry is a poetic sensibility towards nature. Here, love of nature and love of human beings are equated. Wordsworth saw the ubiquitous presence of God in all manifestations of nature. More or less the same thing can be said about people’s perception of nature in Japan. The similarity is at once surprising and expected.

It is important to note that Wordsworth emphasises the point of his poems having been based on his own life. He rejected what he called the “unreal”. This corresponds with one of the cardinal practices of traditional haiku, to draw materials for composition from what actually happens to the poet. The truth to Wordsworth was the feeling of impact which he got from what he saw in real life. This sounds like the “shasei” theory expounded by Masaoka Shiki, the father of modern haiku.

Wordsworth was interested in the consequences of the interaction between nature’s inner forces and the sensibility of human nature. Truths were stored in human nature, nature and God, but they laid dormant unless, and until, a human (such as a poet) would draw them by interacting with nature. In Wordsworth, nature was still positioned as something different from human nature, but at least he saw the importance of the contact between the two. 

potsunen to umi uchi nagamuru ya kisuisen

aloof from the crowd
gazing down at the lake…
a lone golden daffodil

Susumu Takiguchi

an extract from the lecture given at the Cockermouth Festival
Wordsworth House, Cockermouth
Lake District, Cumbria, England
Friday 6 July 2001

 

Poster distributed by Cockermouth Festival, Cumbria, England

 

|  Back  |  Next  |