Expansion of Tanka Poetry
Hagiwara Sakutaro (1886-1942), an avant-garde lyric poet, lived from the Meiji period, through the Taisho period, and died from pneumonia in the early Showa period at the start of World War II. Similar to Akutagawa Ryunosuke with short fiction, Hagiwara’s poetry reworked the entire genre of the burgeoning Japanese free verse. Instead of strict adherence to precepts, Hagiwara emphasized the “rhythmic fusion between objective description and subjective emotion in poetry” (Sato).
One of the ways he did this was his use of the introductory phrase as modeled on some exemplars from traditional tanka poetry. Tanka was written in five lines with a set syllabic count–5, 7, 5, 7, 7–and were used in the royal court for love poetry. Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book relates the high art of exchanging this poetry and contains some good examples. A tanka’s introductory phrase would set the poem’s topic while the rest of the poem would rhyme with it to express that topic’s governing emotion.
As you read this early poem (1913) by Hagiwara, note the following:
- The repeated use of the syllable shi links the first two introductory lines, which comprise the introductory phrase, and the third line.
- This link conveys irrepressible longing, which is the theme of the poem
- Amaririsu (Amaryllis) is the kakekotoba or pivot word. “Nao amari” on its own can mean “still too much” which contrasts strikingly with the image of a flowering.
Ito*shi*geku My hopeless longing
Koi*shi*sa masari deepens to burst forth
*shi*noburedomo though I try to suppress it.
nao amaririsu Amaryllis has come to bloom.
hana sakinikeri
From Reiko Tsukimura’s “Hagiwara Sakutaro and the Japanese Lyric Tradition” (1976).
After he published his second major anthology, Hagiwara published a selection of traditional poems that exemplified this structural linkage with a commentary elucidating how masterful they were.
In this work of criticism, while not rejecting the colloquialism and deep introversion of his earlier work, he does suffer from an anxiety of influence of these exquisite old poems that have been recounted and memorized for hundreds, even thousands, of years. Hagiwara’s last major anthology, The Iceland (1934), was not written in tanka, but was composed in the old masculine style, using primarily modified Chinese characters. Hagiwara labelled this a retreat. However, The Iceland still contains his cry of despair and rage, even more feral than the tanka and free verse poetry before. Scenes of rural and urban decay convey and contrast with the mental state of the poet.
Hagiwara’s Inner Rhythm
Hagiwara’s work paralleled with the European art and philosophy of the late 19th and early 20th century in the symbolist and existentialist traditions. While he had extensive knowledge of classical techniques at an early age, the means he used to shock the establishment were his precise and unambiguous diction and his use of the colloquial to describe an uneasy state of a mind skeptical, melancholic, and cynical and yet at times ecstatic, in a rush of hot emotion.
Some critics use this to his detriment, but Hagiwara’s scope is narrow and concerns not things or people as independent entities, but only they affect his mind (Sato). His poems express these shadows and what he terms as “sentiments” that come to him as images as accurately as possible. For Hagiwara, poetry projects this inner rhythm between shadows or impressions of the world and the lone psyche. And this inner rhythm or relation is what he considers his vision, the vision of a poet.
Under this frozen weather of clouded heaven,
In this kind of oppressed nature,
silent on the side of the road eating grass,
slowly climbing, miserable resultant of destiny,
I approach the spread of the shadow,
The horse’s shadow stares into me.
Ah, let this searing motion leave from there,
from the images of my life
Quickly, quickly let this phantom separate and disappear forever!
I must believe in my Will. Oh, horse!
The fixed rule of destiny’s causation wretches
From the dry plate of the despair of the frozen scene.
From the shadow of the pale horse, I command myself to escape.
Pale Horse” (1923) by Hagiwara Sakutarou
This relation is clear in the poem “Pale Horse” in his second collection “Blue Cat” (1923). In the poem, there is no description of a horse itself, but its pale shadow. In this first-person account (like most of Hagiwara’s poetry), the “I” moves towards the shadow’s direction and the shadow of the horse seems to be watching him.
The second paragraph is a feeble command from his mind for this shadow to leave. He wants to believe in his “Will” apart from this shadow of external laws of cause and effect. This shadow of a force in nature is something that seems to make him and his “Will” irrelevant. This shadow even makes him doubt his own existence as a judge of experience.
In 1942, Hagiwara published a poem “The Army,” which describes a military force destroying the sky, earth, and people in six heavily repetitive stanzas. Perhaps limited by censors during wartime, this poem does not view “The Army” as a political entity, but like the horse’s shadow, a force of nature bearing down and invalidating the primacy of the will. Other than the sounds of the march, the last sentence is the repeated line “the will becomes heavily overwhelmed.”
Does Hagiwara’s method and focus on how this affects the will, give the political, or external, world a pass? If the army is an inevitable force on the individual, can it be held responsible?