What Makes This Haiku Great



                                    a frog floating
                                    in the drugstore jar -
                                    summer rain on grey pavements

                                                                                         by Allen Ginsberg


Haiku are a very varied genre of poem, hard to pin down, perhaps impossible. Yet there is still a distinction between the great, the good, and the poor. This distinction isn’t purely one of taste; it certainly runs much deeper than that. However, it can be very hard to say exactly why one is so good whilst another is not, and for the untrained reader it can also be hard to see which is which.

Whilst there is some scope for taste in judging a haiku, as is the case with anything, it occupies only a small recess of the overall means through which a haiku achieves greatness. In fact, taste does not even come in to the measure of greatness, but serves only to distinguish one poem from another on a personal level. I can’t pretend to know enough about what makes one haiku good and another bad to explain it thoroughly to you, but I would like to try and give some insight into why I think the above haiku by Allen Ginsberg is so appealing.

One thing which this haiku has a lot of is depth. By this I don’t necessarily mean it is profound, but only that there is a huge amount to unpack from these simple few lines. This is one hallmark of greatness in haiku, but it is not a necessary condition of greatness. It is more like a sufficient condition: in this case, if the haiku has a lot of depth then it could potentially be great, but not through this alone. So, what depth is there in this haiku?

Firstly, death is an evident theme. The frog is one half of this, the other half more subtly suggested by the colour grey – a deadened colour. This is interesting, as a more common colour for death would be black, but here grey does the job very well illustrating not only death but the way that death is itself not something sinister, rather something which just is. The colour grey elicits little reaction; it is a colour of nothingness. Likewise death here could be seen as something of little significance.

This tone of death seems further reflected in the summer rain – a fleeting rainstorm, or at least one that is interspersed with sun, which itself shall pass and is a key component of life just as death itself is a component of life. Thus it seems that the summer rain represents the fleetingness of death, and also life, and works in conjunction with the grey pavement to create the sense that death is simply another occurrence, and nothing too remarkable.

The fact that the frog floats in a drugstore jar is again an interesting juxtaposition of death and life – a drugstore providing the possibility of a cure and the prolonging of life whilst at the same time housing within it examples of death. This seems to show part of the exchange between man and nature, or man’s use of nature, which forms another theme in the poem.

A balance is struck between the way nature affects humanity, and the way humanity affects nature. On the one hand the frog is dead and housed in its glass coffin by human hand, whilst on the other hand there is rain falling on the pavement, nature leaving its mark on humanity. Whilst the rain is fleeting, so only leaving a fleeting mark on humanity, it returns time and again. Furthermore death, another part of nature, is clearly something which presides over man as the dead frog reminds us (and those customers who would frequent the store).

The jar, the drugstore, and the pavement all relate to death and all are man-made. However, nature here too is symbolic of death, so it is not to say that man is the cause of death. What is interesting is that man seems to contain death, whilst in nature it is free. The frog is stuck in a jar, the jar in a drugstore. The drugstore itself is a place in which sick people come to be contained, and seek to restrain their illnesses. In all cases man is fighting with death, even when he uses death to do so.

By contrast nature wants to be free. The liquid in which the frog floats would like to burst from the jar given half the chance, and flow away if man did not contain it. Likewise, in nature the frog would be free to continue its cycle, and not be caught in suspension at the end of its existence. Outside, the rain is able to come and go, and the pavement is unable to contain it, even though it may present an obstacle. The rain represents nature in its free state, whilst the liquid in the jar, as well as the frog, represent nature in its captive state.

Perhaps there is a touch of the melancholic in the frog’s death, and the rain on grey, as well as the drugstore being a place where sick people come in search of better health. However, this is largely offset by the neutrality which death is shown to have in this haiku. Furthermore, although nature is trapped by man, nature has an unending capacity to wait. Whilst the frog may be in a suspended state, this is irrelevant to nature’s contingency. Indeed, nature continues to operate in spite of man’s interference. The frog will still decompose, only more gradually, and the pavement will eventually wear away as the continued rains fall time and again upon its surface.

This haiku speaks volumes about death and about balance, and the interaction between humanity and nature, as well as humanity’s place in nature. Something I favour in haiku is the expression of man’s subservience to nature. This poem shows nature as something in which man exists, and does not rule but is ultimately ruled by. It reminds us in numerous ways of the natural order, and for this reason I particularly like it.

Therefore, I believe this haiku has depth, but alone this is not what makes it great. It is this fact in combination with a clever choice of words – words which allow so much response, as well as the limits of what is said and what this consequently allows to grow organically from it.

The somewhat unusual observation forms a strong juxtaposition creating a myriad of connections which develop out of the poem. Structure, word choice, brevity, incompleteness, juxtaposition, and depth, these are all faculties of this work the collaboration of which generate a powerful haiku that speaks volumes through so little.

If I were able, I should like to have been briefer in my explanation and analysis in order to do better service to the successful brevity the work itself employs. Still, I hope that through this you can understand more of what I see in this haiku, why I enjoy it so much, and, ultimately, what makes it great.