Specifically, the 山吹き yamabuki, a yellow flowering rose shrub that grows in thickets on a mountain slopes.
Matsuo Basho’s rose haiku (three versions) on a yellow rose written one year before his death. This is one of those times one says, “You had to be there.” One can not feel the mist on one’s face, see the petals lying scattered in the grass on the ground, or hear the roar of the waterfall. One can’t compete with Mother Nature.
Petals falling and scattering
From a yellow rose
To the noise of a waterfallYellow petals of a rose
tumbling to the thunder
of a waterfallPetal by petal
A Yellow Rose is falling
To the sound of the waterfallほろほろと 山吹ちるか 瀧の音
Horo horo to yamabuki chiru ka taki no oto
Matsuo Basho, 1693
Red Roses
Juliet says,
“A rose by any other name
would smell as sweet.”
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Of course one is aware that a haiku takes a particular form of seventeen syllables, in three lines of five, seven, and five, whose goal is to evoke an image of the natural world that transcends a purely objective view. This does not prevent us from looking at other forms of literature as variations on the haiku. Here, for example is a truncated version of Victor Hugo’s poem, La tomb dit a la rose, a conversation between the grave and a rose.
The Grave says to the Rose
The grave to the rose:
– Why cry at dawn
Flower of love?
.
The rose to the grave:
What do you do with what falls
Into this bottomless abyss?
.
The rose: Dark crypt,
These tears are shed in the shadows
A perfume of amber and honey.
.
The grave: Wistful flower,
Each soul I take I make
— a heavenly angel!
— Victor Hugo, Poems, XXXI, 1888
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