Hiking in the Highland of Haiku !!!

I was going through the blogs of some fellow bloggers, and noted short poems of 3 lines in them. The poems were not of a rhythmic nature, and the words seemed disconnected. However, when I re-read the poems a couple of times, I realized they do have a deeper meaning. Quite interesting though, this practice of illuminating 3 lines, in a much brighter way than usual.


So what's new? I have been writing poems since quite some time. How is this different from those? I got the answer as I read a little further in their blog posts. They had clearly illustrated the meaning of the poem, along with a note saying that this is a haiku in response to a particular subject and a hyperlink pointing to another blog. I clicked, clicked and clicked, and was instantly drawn towards this new arena.

                                                                                    (Image Source: Internet)


A few Google search and going through articles online (thanks to Wikipedia and Yahoo too), I got a basic understanding of how to frame a haiku. Leaving aside the history and origin of it (that you can easily check by a simple query on Google), this is my comprehension of the process:

• There are generally 3 lines in a stanza, and they seem to be non-rhythmic in nature.
• The haiku follows a 5-7-5 syllable format, that is 5 syllables in the 1st line, 7 syllables in the 2nd, and 5 again in 3rd.

The 1st rule appears simple. It's the 2nd one that kept me guessing for a while.

I know it sounds silly, but yes, I wasn't able to understand what the word "syllables" actually mean. Are they referring to the number of words per line? But no, that's not the case. Most haikus didn't have 5-7-5 words format.

Again, Google came in handy. Thanks God for Google.

Just came across a thought while writing this: There are two powers who have the answers to all our queries - Google and God. Isn't it?

Anyways, going back to the topic, I quickly comprehended the meaning of this key word. Let me put it in this way.

Syllable, in simple lay man term, is an uninterrupted segment of speech (copied from dictionary.com). This means the number of continuous sounds that we can find in a word.

Let's take a few examples:

Consider the word "Haiku." When we pronounce it, we make two sounds - "Hai" and "ku". Thus this is a two syllable word.

Similarly "thank" is a one syllable word while "arena" is a 3 syllable word (a-re-na).

Hope this helps all newbies like me. There is still a lot to know about this, and I am studying a bit more on the same.

A request to all - please contribute with your inputs regarding haiku so that "freshers" like me can know and enjoy this further :-)

And as always, live your life and love your life :-)