The atmosphere in literature is the way a writer uses setting, objects, or internal thoughts of characters to create emotion, mood, or experiences for the reader. And atmospheric tanka, a subgenre of tanka with its focus on atmosphere, intends to communicate first of all a feeling rather than an idea.
For example,
a dark
stand of cypress
where crows roost
watching me pass
night after night
Bright Stars, 3, 2014
Simon Hanson
This atmospheric tanka deals with the eerie feeling associated with watchful night crows; This eerie feeling is effectively conveyed through well-chosen images/phrases: a "dark/stand" of cypress/ ... "crows" .../"watching" me pass/ "night after night."
In contrast with my tanka below:
a mob of crows
cawing in the wintry sky ...
a phalanx
of policemen
in riot gear
This atmospheric tanka is about the intense, before-the-storm scene of rioting (as implied from a rectangular mass military formation, L3, of watchful riot police, Ls 4&5). The symbolically rich cawing crows in the wintry sky function like a foreshadowing of a bloody confrontation.
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