in reply to Haiku

Well, apart from not beeing a Haiku, it's nice!

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(OT) Re: Re: Haiku
by trantor (Chaplain) on Sep 05, 2001 at 16:56 UTC

    Yes, there are many ongoing discussions about how a Haiku should be in a language onther than Japanese. So, my haiku is not a haiku for everybody :-)

    Metric is just one of the issues, one of the main reasons being that English and Japanese have a totally different structures, so 17 (usually 5-7-5) English syllables are on average much longer than 17 Japanese onji.

    I found this document quite interesting. To summarize, an English haiku, according to the author's research, must:

    • be brief (e.g. read aloud should be one breath-length long)
    • express a sense of awe of trascendental insight
    • involve some aspect of nature other than human nature (often including a season word)
    • possess sense images, not generalisations
    • present an event happening now

    With these "rules" in mind, I think it can be defined as a haiku, but even in English Haikus, like in Perl, There's More Than One Way To Do It :-)

    -- TMTOWTDI