To the Lighthouse: A Poetic Device, Mitate (Taking One Thing for Another)

The Japanese concept of mitate is to suggest or infer an element B which is absent, through an element A that is present in the text. In writing a haiku or a tanka, one can use mitate, a rhetoric device of "taking one thing for another" to provide a twist/surprise ending as shown in the following most influential haiku before Basho’s old pond haiku was known to the Western literary world:

 The fallen blossom flies back to its branch:

 A butterfly

Arakida Moritake (1472-1549)

(FYI: for further discussion, see my "To the Lighthouse" post, Haiku as a Form of Super-Position)

Or as shown in the following waka:

In my garden

plum blossoms fall –

or is it not rain

but snow, cast down

from the sky?

Otomo No Tabito (665 – 731)

This rhetoric device was already widely used by Li Po, the most famous Chinese Tang poet, whose poetry had a great impact on classical Japanese literature, in his best known poem of all Chinese poems, especially among Chinese living overseas.

"Thoughts in Night Quiet"

Seeing moonlight here at my bed,
and thinking it's frost on the ground,

I look up, gaze at the mountain moon,
then back, dreaming of my old home.

-- translated by David Hinton

In a nutshell, the rhetoric strategy of mitate consists of recalling something in absentia by means of something in praesentia to enhance the visually and emotionally suggestive power of the poem as shown in the following tanka:

I tried to pick it up

but it wasn’t there

a piece of moonlight

I thought was a pen I dropped

while writing to you

Gusts, 30, Fall/Winter 2019

Kath Abela Wilson