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l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness
A
leaf falls loneliness
I
spent a lot of time in high school detention
contemplating this poem by e.e. cummings, which
some people who are better at this than I believe
comes as close to a perfect haiku as will ever
be written.
According
to my notes from back in the day, it's got all
the internal elements of traditional haiku:
• Kigo, or season (fall);
• Renso, the association of disparate
images (the objective image of a leaf falling
and the subjective image of its singular journey,
its "oneliness");
• Hosomi, or the expression of understatement
(just four words, with "fall" serving
as both verb and noun);
• Onitsura, or rapture of realization,
(realization that the falling leaf signifies
the onset of autumn);
• Buson, the enlightenment (the
falling leaf is alone in its journey to its
final destination and that in turn makes the
observer understand loneliness.)
Imagine
yourself sitting on a bench in a little park
in Greenwich Village, as cummmings must've done,
maybe near the White Horse Tavern, and you see
a leaf falling from a tree. How would you write
it as beautifully? The verticalness of the poem
is, of course, a visual representation of the
lonely journey of the falling leaf (squint a
little and you can almost see it). But also,
and this is just a wildass guess, it's a subtle
homage to the Japanese, which (old school) is
written top to bottom.
Of
course, I could be full of shit, in which case
I wasted a lot of time in detention.
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