Walden by Haiku

Economy

[102] Economy farms, houses, barns, cattle— / easily acquired / hard to get rid of “I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of” (5). This may be a little too moralistic and explanatory for a good haiku, but that’s a neat paradox in lines two and three. And this haiku captures Thoreau’s wabi sensibility, his sense that material poverty (or simplicity) is a necessary precondition for spiritual richness. serfs of the soil / digging their graves / as soon as they are born “Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?” (5). The cradle–to– grave digging is a metaphor for a life squandered, but Thoreau presents it as pure image, without commentary. This is typical of several of the haiku drawn from this chapter in that it makes a grammatically complete statement. That is not a typical ploy in haiku, where the idea is to resist closure and to give the suggestiveness of the images free reign. Perhaps the tendency toward grammatical completeness in these early haiku reveal their origins in Thoreau’s more philosophical and discursive prose from the opening chapter. In later chapters the images come so closely clustered that it seems easier to create juxtapositions of two (or more) images. compost / the better part of a man / ploughed into the soil “But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost” (5). This offers an example of Thoreau’s play with paradox. We might imagine “the better part of a man” to be soul or spirit, but Thoreau suggests that it is the physical being. And that corporeal self comes to the usual humble end of all living things. Our anthropocentrism might consider that an inglorious end, and we can [103] certainly read the passage (and the haiku) that way, with the suggestion that to spend our lives doing nothing but pushing around some soil is a waste of life. On the other hand, Thoreau might consider a human life’s contribution to soil nutrients not a bad end result after all. Such ambiguity is encouraged by the open-endedness of a haiku. the oxen / their vegetable-made bones / the lumbering plough “One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;’ and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetablemade bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle” (9). Blyth says another of the Zen preconditions for haiku is courage—usually meaning the courage to stand up to, and against, social conventions. Is there a pun in the reference to the “lumbering” plough? It, too, in its slow path, has “vegetable-made bones.” ripens my beans / illumines a system of earths / the same sun “We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented some mistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed them” (10). Nice juxtaposition here of large (a solar system) and small (beans). Notice that the beans and planets, despite their size differences, echo one another in terms of shape. So does the sun, for that matter. I disrupted the syntax a bit by placing the subject of the actions in the first two lines at the end. This introduces a bit of a rhetorical anomaly and adds an element of surprise. Thus the haiku becomes almost koan-like: what single force could apply to and unify these two very disparate actions—ripening beans and illuminating the solar system? a seed / rooted firmly in the earth / rising to the heavens “The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radicle downward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why has man [104] rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he...