Christianity and Buddhism in Haiku

When it comes to haiku in western culture, there are vast differences between the Buddhist and Christian pieces. However, despite the contrasts, I think that the Christian poems have a larger impact on both the world and in poetry. Personally, I might be a little biased because I’m Christian and since it is a more popular religion across the globe, but I find that they’re more powerful and easier to understand than the Buddhist works. In Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay” it says that “Nature’s first green is gold; Her hardest hue to hold; Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour” (Finch 218). To me, Frost is describing nature and the transition from winter to spring when he said that “Nature’s first green is gold” because I know a lot of people anticipate the first flowers that sprout out of the ground after seeing snow for the last several months. At the end of the poem, Frost is describing the end of summer and the start of fall when he says that “So dawn goes down to day.; Nothing gold can stay.”. Earlier in the piece, he said that nature’s first green is gold (the first sight of flowers and other spring elements) and now he is talking about how that same gold can’t stay and will fall.

When I read Yosa Buson’s haiku, interpreted by Robert Hass, it was a lot harder to conceptualize in my head, mostly because it was a lot more concise than the previous poem I mentioned above. In the poem, “The petals fall; and the river takes them-; plum tree on the bank.” (Finch 218). To be honest, I don’t know what a peach tree really looks like and am not sure how there can be one next to a river. I think the season that Hass interpreted is the fall because he said that “The petals fall; and the river takes them”. I can relate to this because, at my house, we have a bunch of trees next to my pool, and sometimes when the wind blows hard enough, there are pine needles that fall into the pool and my dad will have to skim them out.

Finch, Annie, and Kathrine Varnes. An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art. University of Michigan Press, 2002.

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