To the Lighthouse: A Rhetorical Device, Synaesthesia

                                                                                                long walk home...
                                                                                                the sound of police sirens
                                                                                                darkens the night

A color is employed to suggest the quality of scent, a crying sound, a tactile sensation, or a temperature. As in the case of the Kabuki theatre, Eisenstein argues that the montage effect of haiku results in the experience of synaesthesia or multisensory experience. This characteristic helps him to develop the key principles of audiovisual montage and color-sound montage.

-- Chen-ou Liu, "Haiku as Ideogrammatic Montage: A Linguistic-Cinematic Perspective," Haiku Reality, 5

...  this deliberate confusion of senses is a superb rhetorical technique. The “transference of the senses” as a rhetorical device is a familiar element in Japanese poetry.

-- Peipei Qiu, Basho and the Dao: The Zhuangzi and the Transformation of Haikai, p.91

A haiku or a tanka without "rhetoric" was likely to be no more  than a brief observation without poetic tension or illumination.

-- Donald Keene, The Winter Sun Shines in: A Life of Masaoka Shiki, p 57.

Eisenstein thinks that haiku is “little more than hieroglyphs transposed into phrases,” 33 and that each of these haiku is made up of montage phrases or shot lists. 34 The “simple combination of two or three details of a material kind yields a perfectly finished representation of another kind – [the] psychological.” 35 For him, “haiku… act simultaneously as linguistic signifiers and denotative images of ‘natural’ things.” 36 Structurally and consequentially speaking, he considers haiku as an extension of the ideogrammatic structure characterizing the Chinese and Japanese writing systems. He believes that a Japanese haiku master’s juxtaposing two or three separate images to create a new meaning parallels his crashing two or three conflicting shots with each other to produce a new filmic essence. The juxtaposition of contrasting images in haiku (or the collision of conflicting shots in cinema) may single out, highlight, and purify a particular quality. Take Basho’s ever-famous frog haiku for example:

an old pond...

a frog leaps in,

the sound of water

His juxtaposition of two contrasting images of "an old pond" and " a frog leaping into the pond" makes a larger meditative, lonely silence “heard” through the opposition of the water sound. 37 More importantly, juxtaposed images of some haiku engage the reader in more than one sense, as can be seen in the following ones by Basho:

Their fragrance

Is whiter than peach blossoms

The daffodils

Over the evening sea

The wild ducks' cry

Is faintly white

It is whiter

Than the rocks of Ishiyama

The autumn wind

Onions lie

Washed in white

How chilly it is 38

A color is employed to suggest the quality of scent, a crying sound, a tactile sensation, or a temperature. 39 As in the case of the Kabuki theatre, Eisenstein argues that the montage effect of haiku results in the experience of synaesthesia or multisensory experience. 40 This characteristic helps him to develop the key principles of audiovisual montage and color-sound montage. 41

-- excerpted from Chen-ou Liu's Haiku Reality essay, titled "Haiku as Ideogrammatic Montage: A Linguistic-Cinematic Perspective"  (For further discussion on the relationship between haiku and cinema, see "To the Lighthouse: Arranged Marriage of Haiku and Cinema")

The rhetorical device, synaesthesia (transference of the senses), is a "familiar element in Japanese poetry... the method of “conceit” [is] derived from the Zhuangzi-style yugen in earlier haikai" (Peipei Qiu, p. 91) This device has also been employed in many of Basho’s famous haiku as quoted above. The following is the most famous one that is praised for its skillful description of the seascape and of a sense of solitude.

umi kurete                  The sea darkens:      

kamo no koe               the voices of wild ducks

honokani shiroshi       are faintly white.

Basho                         trans. by  Peipei Qiu

Commentary by  Peipei Qiu (p. 91)

... as darkness begins to permeate the sea, the faint cry of wild ducks fades into the infinite silence; it deepens the stillness, like a piece of whiteness heightens the darkness of the sea. In this poem, the auditory image, “the voices of wild ducks,” is described with a visual term, “white.” This “transference of the senses” has invited numerous comments. Some readers believe that with “whiteness” Basho really is not describing sound but something else -- the waves, the sea, the vapor over the sea, the color of wild ducks, and so forth. Others maintain that “whiteness” does indeed depict “the voices,” and this deliberate confusion of senses is a superb rhetorical technique.... (For a brief summary and translation of comments on the poem by Japanese scholars, see Makoto Ueda, Basho and His Interpreters, pp. 123–124)

Haiku Examples and Short Comments:

Whiter, whiter

Than the stones of Ishiyama

This autumn wind.

Basho

trans. by Donald Keene

The haiku above was written in 1689 when Basho visited Nata Temple in Komatsu (Peipei Qiu, p. 91). The visual image, "white" (in L1), is used not only to describe a hill of white stones on which Nata Temple was built, but also the purity of autumn wind.

As the bell tone fades,

Blossom scents take up the ringing.
Evening shade.

Basho

The haiku above merges three sensory modes. Steve Odin suggests that “the reverberating sound of a fading bell tone merges with the fragrant perfume of flower blossom, which in turn blends with the shadowy darkness of evening shade”.

the brightness

of the full moon

deepens the cold

Hiss of Leaves, 2012

T. D. Ingram
 

The haiku above is a one-sentence haiku. Ingram’s skillful use of cutting (through the excellent choice of a verbal phrase) and synaesthesia makes a successful shift from the physical/outer world (portrayed in a natural scene) to the mental/inner one (indicating the narrator’s state of mood). The contrasts between these two worlds are psychologically effective.

whispers of a fragrance
my sister loved
evening in spring

First Prize, 2010 Betty Drevniok Award

Ellen Compton

Judge's comment: The winning haiku. The 1st prize haiku, with an element of synaesthesia, achieved with muted personification, invokes as many as four senses with the phrase “whispers of a fragrance” while the nature of the scent itself is left an enigma. This, with the past tense in the second line, creates an air of nostalgia, without being maudlin. Added to this, the line “evening in spring” is the title of the last of Richard Strauss’s “Four Last Songs”, a personal favourite, and among the greatest of German lieder. (Noote: four senses? I don't think so. synaesthesia, transference of the senses, is more about "the transfer of qualities from one sensory domain to another, to the translation of texture to tone or of tone to color, smell or taste ..."/ interaction between different sensory images than merely the juxtaposition of them. See Steve Odin's comment on Basho's "bell tone" haiku).


Updated, October 19

The old man’s voice
is the color of his hair
this frosty night

Gregory D. Cottrell

Gregory D. Cottrell describes the old man’s voice as the color of his hair (white), giving readers a feeling of chilly whiteness (a wintry feeling)

Searching on the wind,
the hawk's cry
is the shape of its beak

J.W. Hackett

J.W. Hackett describes sound through sight. The shape of the hawk’s beak represents its cry, which is sharpened by the wind.