“l(a”: A Haiku by E. E. Cummings

One of the many poets experimenting with haiku in the early part of the 20th century—along with Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, Jack Kerouac, and many others of the Imagist and later Beat periods—was E. E. Cummings. The poet’s definitive Complete Poems 1904–1962 includes three poems of an unspecified date [actually, from the April 1916 issue of Harvard Monthly] labelled as “hokku” (875). Also, Richard S. Kennedy has reported in Dreams in the Mirror, his biography of Cummings, that around 1951 the poet read “a book on the Haiku by R. H. Blythe [sic] (lent by John Cage)” (438). And David V. Forrest, writing in The Journal of Psychiatry, has noted that “Cummings was much impressed by Chinese poetry, and once referred me to R. H. Blyth’s Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics,” adding that “Cummings’ treatment of nature resembles the Chinese and Japanese perpetual celebration of and astonishment at the cycle of the seasons, and the involvement of the natural world in one’s expressions of deep feelings” (37, 38). In a letter to Forrest of February 10, 1960, cited in the same Psychiatry article, Cummings (also a painter) wrote that “What attracted me about Zen was chiefly the become-a-mountain-if-you’d-paint-one-doctrine” (38).

   Beyond these indications of Cummings’ awareness of haiku, we see much indication in the poetry itself of Cummings’ understanding of haiku. I have written at length on the topic of Cummings’ indubitable haiku sensibilities in Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society (October 1994). In contrast, I have also written in Frogpond (Spring–Summer 1993) about the failings of Cummings’ three “hokku” as haiku. It seems fitting in the Zen tradition, though, that E. E. Cummings most closely approximated haiku when apparently he was not even trying. He did this best with a poem known by its first line, “l(a,” an examination of which will serve to illustrate Cummings’ understanding of haiku, and show the possible influence of haiku on Cummings’ poetry.

   Indeed, “l(a” is my favourite of a number of Cummings’ “haiku.” This poem—actually the first to appear in his 1958 book, 95 Poems (in a place of emphasis and importance)—is recognized as haiku more often than any other Cummings poem [it was included, although with errors, in the Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years Norton anthology in 2013]. It also appears in Cummings’ widely available Complete Poems 1904–1962 (673):

l(a

le

af

fa

ll

s)

one

l

iness

Much has been written about this poem, particularly its sense of individuality, inventive visual effects, and the many ways it evokes the number one, and “oneliness.” It is even prefaced by the numeral one at the top of its page (as the first of 95 numbered poems in the book). As we read the poem from top to bottom (Japanese style), we see “la” and then “le,” the French feminine and masculine definite articles—both indicating the singularity of oneliness (Cummings spoke French). Then in the switching letters of “af” and “fa,” we see the leaf twisting as it falls through the air. The “ll” that appears in the middle of the poem (note the poem’s vertically symmetrical line arrangement) can be read as a sideways equal sign (=) equating loneliness to a leaf falling. Then, in “s),” perhaps we see the leaf’s stem, or the gentle curve of the leaf’s descent. And in “one” and “l” we are reminded of the idea of individuality and identity, both in the spelling out of the word “one,” and in the happy accident that the letter “l” and the number “1” look almost identical—and in fact do look the same on many typewriters and some computer typestyles. Finally, in the last line, we see again the idea of identity, “iness,” that the “I” is a complete individual—as individual as a falling leaf—not “lonely” but “onely”—not empty but full. Even the poem’s overall shape suggests the numeral for one.

   Midwest American haiku poet Raymond Roseliep, in a 1982 article, cited “l(a” among five classic English haiku, the others being by Wallace Stevens, W. S. Merwin, W. H. Auden, and Dag Hammarskjöld. Roseliep had asked Cummings if this poem could be read aloud, and reported the poet’s answer: “No, it couldn’t Cummings said, because it is a purely visual poem; but he added, with boyish excitement, that some woman was planning to perform a dance to it” (18). Roseliep concluded his citation with the regret that he did not ask Cummings if he intended the poem as haiku.

   But surely it is. Writing in The Japan Times in 1983, Gene Bluestein discussed Cummings’ cross-cultural achievement in creating a haiku with “l(a.” He indicated that the “juxtaposition of a natural fact and the insight it gives leads to our first glimmer that Cummings knows some aspects of haiku strategy” (10). Bluestein explained that he once shared Cummings’ poem with an American Studies class in Hiroshima. A student, Masato Takimoto, spontaneously rendered the poem into Japanese (10):

一片の葉が舞い落ちる物悲し

Hitohira no

Ha ga maiochiru

Monganashi

   Takimoto’s version speaks more of melancholy [or sadness] than loneliness, however. A more accomplished attempt at translating the poem into Japanese was published in 1967 by Yukinobu Kagiya (27):

サ

(一枚

の木

の葉

が落

ち

る）

ビ

シ

サ

   The preceding version preserves the critical use of parentheses, which not only separate “loneliness” into “l” and “oneliness,” but may also indicate the leaf’s path in their two graceful curves. Ula Shibazaki has written in greater detail about this translation in Spring (October 1994).

   The German critic Sabine Sommerkamp, in her 1984 dissertation on haiku, also cited “l(a” as a seminal English haiku from the concrete poetry and Imagist schools (154–155). She devoted an entire section of her research to Cummings and the compressed poetry of his typographical ideograms, of which “l(a” is but one. Robert E. Wegner has said of these ideograms that they are “probably Cummings’ most difficult form. These most terse of poems combine visual and auditory elements” (143), and notes that “The ideogram compresses perception, feeling, and realization [as does haiku] until they are no longer distinguishable, until, as Keats observed, beauty is truth and truth is beauty. . . . His purpose in striving for compression in these poems was to realize more fully the truth about . . . being alive that he felt resided in something as simple as seeing a flake of snow” (148).

   In a letter to biographer Richard S. Kennedy dated July 21, 1978, Mitchell Morse called “l(a” “in spirit a perfect haiku” (Kennedy, 463, 512), and Kennedy distinguished the poem as “the most delicately beautiful literary construct that Cummings ever created” (463). That the intensity of this praise is directed at so brief a poem is a testament to haiku’s depth and vitality. Also, the poem echoes R. H. Blyth’s identification of loneliness as one of the thirteen characteristics necessary for the creation of haiku (Haiku, 161–169). Blyth also said that haiku is “a hand beckoning, a door half-opened, a mirror wiped clean. It is a way of returning to nature, to our moon nature, our cherry blossom nature, our falling leaf nature, in short, to our Buddha nature” (Haiku, 243, emphasis added).

   Noted Zen commentator D. T. Suzuki has underscored the solitary quality of autumn in an essay on the Japanese love of nature: “The falling leaves in autumn have often awakened the poetic sensibility of the nature-loving Japanese,” emphasizing that “aloneness . . . is the spirit of autumn-nature” (341). This sentiment is not peculiar to Japan, of course: the image of a falling leaf has obvious melancholic universality. Knowing that Cummings read both Suzuki and Blyth—preferring Blyth to Suzuki (Forrest, 38)—at least some antecedent and influence for “l(a” can be traced to Japan. As already noted, the poem’s letters even cascade down the page in a manner reminiscent of written Japanese.

   The Japanese antecedent seems especially likely given that Cummings’ poem is startlingly similar to a falling-leaf haiku written by Bashō in 1692. Evidence suggests that Cummings read Bashō’s poem, here translated by Harold G. Henderson from his 1958 book An Introduction to Haiku (47):

淋しさを   とうてくれぬか   きりひとは

Sabishisa wo Won’t you come and see

Toute kurenu ka loneliness? Just one leaf

Kiri hito ha from the kiri tree?

   Henderson explained that “The kiri (paulownia) is noted for dropping its leaves even when no breath of wind is stirring” (47), a fact that deepens the stillness and sabi of Bashō’s poem. The same depth also resonates in Cummings’ falling-leaf poem. The leaf itself functions effectively as an objective correlative to the mood of loneliness, and the leaf’s path and singularity neatly parallel the notion of oneliness. Faubion Bowers, writing in The Classic Tradition of Haiku: An Anthology, has noted that “Just as ‘blossom,’ when not modified, means cherry flower in haiku, ‘one leaf’ is code for kiri.” He adds that, “Their falling symbolizes loneliness and connotes the past. The large purple flowers in early autumn are deeply associated with haiku because the three prongs hold 5, 7 and 5 buds respectively. . . . The blooms and their bracket of leaves form the crest of the Empress of Japan” (28).

Cummings may have also been familiar with a falling leaf poem by Kyoshi Takahama (1874–1959), who was chosen by Shiki as his successor. Kyoshi’s 1906 poem also speaks eloquently of the kiri tree:

桐一葉日当りながら落ちにけり

kiki hitoha                                                   A paulownia leaf

hi atarinagara                                             Caught all the while in sunlight

ochinikeri                                                    Flutters to the ground.

According to Donald Keene, who translated the preceding poem (115), “Kyoshi himself believed that this poem expressed in microcosmic form the wonder of heaven and earth” (116). Surely this is the same wonder Cummings saw in the oneliness of a falling leaf. Perhaps the sunlight catching Kyoshi’s falling leaf is implicit in Cummings’ poem.

   Incidentally, Bluestein further noted that “the separation of the leaf from the tree is symbolic of loneliness and alienation” (10). Yet there is a sweet and comfortable transcendency to the poem, a notion of finding one’s place in the continuum of being. Blyth has noted that “a falling leaf has the whole of autumn, of every autumn, of the eternal, the timeless autumn of each and of all things” (Haiku, 9). Similarly, Alan Watts observed in The Way of Zen that “the artificial haiku always feels like a piece of life which has been deliberately broken off or wrenched away from the universe, whereas the genuine haiku has dropped off all by itself [like a leaf], and has the whole universe inside it” (196). In his posthumous collection, 73 Poems, Cummings echoed this thought (and his personal identification with a falling leaf) by writing, “and marvellously self diminutive / whose universe a single leaf may be” (Complete, 821). In this sense, Cummings’ most genuine haiku is both sharply focused and tremendously expansive—an exploding condensation of the kind achieved regularly by the best haiku. This poem, like several other “haiku” of E. E. Cummings, has fallen off all by itself, and has come to rest in the reader’s lap with all the universe inside it.

Works Cited

Bluestein, Gene. “Hop Over the Culture Barrier With Haiku.” The Japan Times, Sunday, 24 July 1983: 10.

Blyth, R. H. Haiku. 4 vols. Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1949–1952; South San Francisco: Heian International, 1981–1982.

———. Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics. Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1942.

Bowers, Faubion, ed. The Classic Tradition of Haiku: An Anthology. Mineola, New York: Dover, 1996.

Cummings, E. E. Complete Poems 1904–1962. George J. Firmage, ed. New York: Liveright, 1991.

Forrest, David V. “E. E. Cummings and the Thoughts That Lie Too Deep for Tears: Of Defenses in Poetry.” The Journal of Psychiatry, 43:1 (February 1980): 13–42.

Henderson, Harold G. An Introduction to Haiku. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1958.

Kagiya, Yukinobu. Translation of “l(a” in Mugen No. 23, 1967, p. 27. (Grateful thanks to Fay Aoyagi for typesetting this poem in Japanese.)

Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era. New York, Holt, 1984, 1987.

Kennedy, Richard S. Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings. New York: Liveright, 1980.

Roseliep, Raymond. “‘Spots of Time’: Five Classic Haiku.” Haiku Review 82: 18–19.

Sommerkamp, Sabine. “Der Einfluss des Haiku auf Imagismus and Jüngere Moderne: Studien zur englischen und amerikanischen Lyrik.” Diss. Universität Hamburg, 1984.

Shibazaki, Ula. “Wordleaf Inspirations: A View from Japan.” Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, No. 4 (October 1994): 144–148.

Suzuki, D. T. Zen and Japanese Culture. Princeton, New Jersey: Bollingen, 1959.

Watts, Alan W. The Way of Zen. New York: Pantheon, 1957.

Wegner, Robert E. The Poetry and Prose of E. E. Cummings. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965.

Welch, Michael Dylan. “Three Hokku by E. E. Cummings.” Frogpond, XVI:1 (Spring–Summer, 1993): 51–56.

———. “The Haiku Sensibilities of E. E. Cummings.” Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, No. 4 (October 1994): 95–120. (Also delivered at the June 1994 American Literature Association conference held in San Diego on the centennial of E. E. Cummings’ birth; the present paper derives, in part, from this earlier publication.)