Walden by Haiku

House-Warming

[57] House-Warming a-graping to the river meadows beauty and fragrance and food cranberries in meadow grass plucked with an ugly rake jammed in Boston the chestnut woods sleeping their long sleep under rails scarlet maples the character of each tree reflected in the pond northeast shore in autumn fireside of the pond summer’s last embers [58] studying masonry to build my chimney with second-hand bricks mortaring the chimney our knives thrust into the earth to scour them the north wind cooling the pond a fire in the evening rafters with the bark on where flickering shadows may play at evening a house which you have got into when you have opened the door sending home each nail a single blow [59] plastering done the wind howls given permission the wood-pile warming me twice in the splitting and on the fire smoke from my chimney gives notice to Walden vale I am awake Fire and I keeping house moles nest in the cellar a lamp to lengthen out the day a sharper blast from the north looking into it at evening always a face in the fire [60] One of the rhetorical anomalies that catches the attention in Japanese haiku is the use of sound devices—rhyme is avoided, but alliteration and assonance are frequently employed. These are often lost in translation, of course, but in the best contemporary English-language haiku, there is clearly an attention to sound and rhythm. I will not attempt to defend the rhythms of the Thoreauvian haiku I have extracted from Walden, since in truth much of the time what I have done is winnow images from longer sentences, thereby losing the original rhythms. In fact, one could make a case that the verbosity of Thoreau’s original sentences is a product of his attention to sentence rhythms. (The verbosity is relative, of course; I mean it only in comparison to haiku language.) One of the appeals of Thoreau’s prose is the rhythm—but that is one of the contexts out of which I have taken select phrases and images. But alliteration and assonance remain. I’ll offer just one haiku (out of many possible ones) as example here: “sending home / each nail / a single blow.” Even in a mere eight words, there is much repetition of sound: the ing in sending and single; the l in nail and single; the o in home and blow. I also note the shift in sound in the repeated ing—the first g part of a velar nasal, almost silent, the second one hard, the hard one suggesting the arrival, at virtually the same moment, of both the hammer blow and the sunk nail. ...