Poetic Musings: Ezra Pound’s "Metro Poem" as a Yugen Haiku

 In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Lustra, 1916

Ezra Pound

(note:In his most widely-read book, The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku, William Higginson emphasizes that Ezra Pound’s metro poem is the “first published hokku in English”)

Following the lead of Hugh Kenner -- "Apparition reaches two ways, toward ghosts and toward visible revealings” -- in The Pound Era, Jyan-Lung Lin links Kenner’s reading to a Daoist-inspired Japanese poetic characteristic, yugen.

(note: The compound “yūgen” 幽玄 (lit., depth and mystery) is made of two Chinese characters: “Yū” means “faint, dim,” and also “deep;” “gen” indicates the black color, the color of heaven, something far away, something quiet, and an occult principle. We find the character “gen” used in the Tao Te Ching (Classic of the Way and Integrity) to describe the “Way:"

These two -- the nameless and what is named -- emerge from the same source yet are referred to differently. Together they are called obscure (Chinese, xuan; Japanese, gen), the obscurest of the obscure, they are the swinging gateway of the manifold mysteries.1

Thus, “yūgen” is something well beyond the reach of man’s immediate perception and understanding, since it is too deep and too far for humans to reach, even conceptually. In ancient China, yūgen came to indicate the other world, as well as the Taoist Way and Buddhist enlightenment.2  -- Yūgen by Michael F. Marra)

Below is an excerpt from Jyan-Lung Lin’s essay, “In A Station of the Metro’ As A Yugen Haiku," which was published in  Paidenma, 21:1-2, Spring/Fall 1992, and posted on Modern American Poetry:

A great deal has been written about Ezra Pound’s discovery of a structural technique, "a form of super-position," (note: For more information, see To the Lighthouse: Haiku as a Form of Super-Position) in Japanese haiku and his first use of it in his "In a Station of the Metro." (note: For more information, see To the Lighthouse: Haikuesque Reading of Ezra Pound’s “Metro Poem” )

    [….]

However, it has seldom been noticed that when Pound first imitated Moritake’s most famous haiku, he imitated not just its super-pository technique but its mood of Yugen (note: There is no mood of yugen conveyed in Moritake’s haiku. Obviously, Lin didn’t know about the Japanese poetic device, “mitate, taking one thing for another," and about Moritake’s allusion to the Zen saying: “The fallen blossom cannot return to its branch." However, I do agree principally with Lin’s analysis of Pound’s metro poem from the perspective of yugen. For more information, see To the Lighthouse: Haiku as a Form of Super-Position), one of the four dominant Zen moods--Sabi, Wabi, Aware, and Yugen -- often found in Japanese haiku and Chinese classical poetry.

The word Yugen actually represents two Chinese written characters . . . literally meaning depth and mystery.

    [….]

Lucien Stryk in his Encounter with Zen more clearly defines Yugen as the sense of a mysterious depth in nature: "Yugen, most difficult of the dominant [Zen] moods to describe, is the sense of a mysterious depth in all that makes up nature" (Stryk 60).

    [….]

First let me use the following haiku of Yugen as an example:

    The sea darkens,

    The voices of the wild ducks

    Are faintly white

And this Yugen in the Zenrin Kushu:

    Wind subsiding, the flowers still fail,

    Bird crying, the mountain silence deepens

As the two preceding poems may show, in a typical Yugen the mood of a mysterious depth in each cluster of images is well balanced with and reinforced by the mood in the other. In Pound’s "In a Station of the Metro" a similar use of parallelism to strengthen the mood of Yugen can be seen clearly.

In the first line of his poem, Pound uses the word "apparition" to mystify the visual yet unmetaphorical image "these faces in the crowd." As Hugh Kenner observes, "‘Apparition’ reaches two ways, toward ghosts and toward visible revealings" (Kenner 187). Indeed. Pound’s use of the word "apparition" internalizes and at the same time externalizes his feelings about "these faces in the crowd." In other words, his use of the word "apparition" allows him and his reader to walk the edge between what can be seen and what cannot be seen, which not only mystifies the image "these faces in the crowd" but gives a depth to it. In the second line, by inserting the two adjectives "wet" and "black" in between the two flower images "Petals" and "a bough," the poet suggests that the ["kigo"] or season, a basic component in a haiku poem, is between spring and winter and the time is probably the evening, which is between day and night. By allowing the season and the time to walk the line between spring and winter, day and night, which may represent life and death respectively, Pound succeeds in building up a mood of mystery. This mood of mystery is deepened particularly by the color "black," whose profound darkness points to an unfathomable depth.

As can be seen in a typical Yugen haiku, the mood of mystery and depth suggested in the dark, chilly ["kigo"] in the second line of Pound’s poem is parallel with the same mood suggested in the word "apparition" in the first line. Since the moods in both lines are well-balanced, no copula or adjectives such as "is" or "like" should be used between the lines so that the mood in each line would not be limited to a certain suggestion. Instead, the two lines should be juxtaposed as they presently are so that each of the two clusters of images, which, if viewed separately, is not deep and mysterious enough to be called Yugen, would produce a deeper, more mysterious mood. Moreover, a sense of distance or space between the two clusters of images can be built up, which allows the reader to associate, to imagine, to dive more deeply into what Watts calls "the unknown never to be discovered."

In fact, in a Yugen haiku like Pound’s "In a Station of the Metro" meanings are not so important. What is important is the effect, the mood of Yugen. This mood, as mentioned before, is identified by Zen people as an essential precondition of enlightenment. It produces and at the same time is produced by the image, which is not to be used as an ornament but to point at the Tao or self-nature, a mysterious totality of the inner and outer nature. This Zen mood may well be compared to the kind of mood Pound has written about in his Gaudier-Brzeska. It has something to do with "the image," "a radiant node or cluster"--"sea, cliffs, night"--, something to do with "a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing," something to do with "the equation," of which Pound’s explanation sounds much like a Zen master’s expounding of the Dharma: it "governs the circle. It is the circle. It is not a particular circle, it is any circle and all circles. It is nothing that is not a circle. It is the circle free of space and time limits. It is the universal, existing in perfection, in freedom from space and time" (Pound 9 1-92).

To the Lighthouse: Haiku as a Form of Super-Position

Before Basho’s famous frog haiku was known to the literary world, the most influential Japanese haiku was written by Arakida Moritake (1472-1549):

 The fallen blossom flies back to its branch:

 A butterfly

(Pound, 1914, p.467).

In his essay on Vorticism in the September 1914 issue of The Fortnightly Review, Pound “explicitly credits the technique of the Japanese hokku in helping him work out the solution to a ‘metro emotion:’” (Pound, 1916, p. 103)

A Chinaman said long ago that if a man can’t say what he has to say in twelve lines he had better to keep quiet. The Japanese have evolved the still shorter form of the hokku… The "one-image poem" is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another. I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work "of second intensity." Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence 1:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals, on a wet, black bough.

Pound’s learning about haiku was mainly through his reading of Yone Noguchi’s (1875 – 1947) work. Noguchi’s poetry, The Pilgrimage and Japanese Hokkus, and his literary criticism, The Spirit of Japanese Poetry, in particular, were widely read in the West. He played “a principal role in relating Japanese poetics to Western intensions in early modernism.” (Hakutani, p. 2) In his essay, entitled “What Is a Hokku Poem?,” Noguchi emphasized that “poetic images must be active instead of suggestive, direct instead of symbolic, and that the aim of a hokku is to understand the spirit of nature rather than to express the will of man.” (Noguchi, p.34). These aesthetic ideas were employed in Pound’s essay, one of whose main goals was to articulate poetic ideals opposed to Victorian poetry, which he characterized as wordy and rhetorical, …and … in contrast to “the suggestiveness and vagueness of symbolist poetry.” (Hakutani, p3)

Now, let’s have an in-depth look at what Pound learned about the Japanese haiku poetics. Below is Noguchi’s English translation

I thought I saw the fallen leaves

Returning to their branches:

Alas, butterflies were they.

(Noguchi, p. 50)

Both Pound’s and Noguchi’s translations as well as the Japanese original contain the following keywords:  “fallen”, “branch, “ and “butterfly.” The big difference in diction is between Pound’s “blossom” and Noguchi’s “leaves.” And syntactically speaking, Pound’s translation starts objectively and ends subjectively; conversely, Noguchi’s translation begins subjectively (“I thought I saw”…) and ends objectively (Noguchi, p.35).

In terms of haiku poetics, the most aesthetically significant thing about Pound’s translation is that he succinctly reconstructed Noguchi’s three-line hokku in two lines, which reveals his view of haiku as a “form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another.” (Pound, 1916, p. 103). The super-pository division is indicated by his use of a colon.

Read in the context of Japanese classic haiku, technically speaking, there is nothing new about Moritake’ s haiku. In it, he employed a centuries-old poetic device, “mitate” (taking one thing for another) 2 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)

(Addiss, p. 17)

However, this haiku gains more resonance if the reader is aware of the following Zen saying: “The fallen blossom cannot return to its branch.” It makes this saying anew in light of the transformative power of a butterfly. That’s one of the reasons that Moritake’ s haiku is considered “one of the most famous verses of all early haikai poets.” (Addiss, p. 62)

Notes:

1 For more information about Pound's "metro poem," see To the Lighthouse: Haikuesque Reading of Ezra Pound’s “Metro Poem.”

2 In the haiku below, which was posted on Saturday, March 16, 2013,

breezy morning
the gliding yellow bird
turns into a leaf

Peggy Heinrich's emotionally effective use of  mitate is impressive: the good context-setting L1 and the shift, tonal and thematic, in L3 lift the haiku up a notch.


References:

Pound, Ezra, Gaudier-Brzeska, 1916,

                 --, “Vorticism, ” The Fortnightly Review, September 1914

Hakutani, Yoshinobu, Haiku and Modernist Poetics, 2009

Noguchi, Yoné, Selected English Writings of Yone Noguchi: Prose, 1992

Addiss, Stephen, The Art of Haiku:Its History through Poems and Paintings by Japanese Masters, Shambhala, 2012.

To the Lighthouse: Haikuesque Reading of Ezra Pound’s “Metro Poem”

Throughout the history of English poetry, there seldom is a poem like Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (hereafter referred to as “metro poem”) that has been endlessly researched by scholars, literary critics, and poets alike. 1 Most of his readers are familiar with at least two versions of his metro poem: the original version published in the April 1913 issue of Poetry as follows:

 In a Station of the Metro

The apparition    of these face    in the crowd:

Petals      on a wet, black bough.

and one of the revised versions published in his 1916 book entitled Lustra as follows:

 In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Everyone may have his/her own reading of this ever-famous poem from different perspectives. But due to the limited space of this chapter and for readers who are interested in the Asian poetic traditions, I will discuss two major popular readings – the haikuesque and ideogrammatic ones -- in the following sections.

In his most widely-read book, The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku, William Higginson rightly emphasizes that Ezra Pound’s metro poem is the “first published hokku in English” 2 and “very important to its author‘s development.” 3 In his essay on “Vorticism” in the September 1914 issue of The Fortnightly Review, Pound “explicitly credits the technique of the Japanese hokku in helping him work out the solution to a ‘metro emotion:’” 4

The Japanese have evolved the… form of the hokku… I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work "of second intensity." Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

       Petals, on a wet, black bough.

Higginson first points out that the main effect of the change between the 1913 version and 1914 one is “to smooth the rhythm, making the poem less choppy,” 5 and then he focuses the discussion on the most recognizable version by haiku readers, the one that was published in his book, Lustra, as follows:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

From the perspective of a haiku poet, Higginson singles out the most important change Pound made: that is the one from the colon at the end of the first line to a semicolon. In his view, a colon tells the reader that the statement made in the first line introduces the statement made in the second, making one a metaphor for the other. Conversely, a semicolon shows that two statements are independent of each other, though maybe related, and that both images -- “faces” and “petals” -- portrayed in the poem are real and stand out against its own background. 6 As Higginson stresses, “by revising the poem Pound turned an otherwise sentimental metaphor into a genuine haiku… This is a haiku that Shiki would have been proud to write.” 7

However, Higginson’s reading of the metro poem is chiefly through the haiku lens. He doesn’t consider the contexts of Pound’s struggle with a new kind of poetry, not just with one poem, but of the growing impacts of the Chinese language in general, and Chinese poetry in particular, upon his view of writing poetry. Outside the haiku community, the metro poem is viewed as a haiku-like, yet new kind of poem: the most influential imagist poem based on his ideogrammatic poetics. In the introduction of The Norton Anthology of American Literature (Volume D), it firmly states: "Pound first campaigned for 'imagistic,' his name for a new kind of poetry. Rather than describing something -- an object or situation -- and then generalizing about it, imagist poets attempted to present the object directly, avoiding the ornate diction and complex but predictable verse forms of traditional poetry." (for further information on the ideogrammatic reading of Pound's metro poem, see my Magnapoets essay, "Three Readings of Ezra Pound’s 'Metro Haiku',” which can be accessed at http://www.scribd.com/doc/59988372/Three-Readings-of-Ezra-Pound-s-Metro-Haiku)


Note: In the future "To the Lighthouse" posts, I will offer an contextualized analysis of Pound's view of haiku as a “form of super-position,... that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another.” (Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 103), and an in-depth review of his "metro haiku" from the perspective of  haiku poetics (yugen and kire).