The reference of celestial
bodies has been associated with social and religious causes since time
immemorial. The earliest Chinese farmer's calendar can be traced back to
5141-5042 B.C when the farmers refer the cycle of the moon and other celestial
bodies to determine the farming activities. In the book, “Yu Tu Bei Kao Quan Shu” the motions of the sun and
moon, the stars and constellations have been depicted. Astronomy cards of
Zodiacal constellations, designed by Jehoshaphat Aspin (assumed name), are dated
back to the early Babylonian period, possibly to the Sumerian time. Tibetan
astrological Thangka, hung in the home for protection from evil, is characterized
by nine magic squares and symbols of the eight
planets.
The references of Astronomy are
found in the Rigveda, the ancient Indian literature (most likely 1500-1200 BCE)
of Sanskrit hymns. Astronomy (Nakshatravidya) is elaborated in the Chhandogya
Upanishad. The Vedic Seers in Sanskrit literature often cited cosmological
mentions like the light in the sky, stars, planets, etc.
Petrus Apianus (1492-1552) described the cosmos
according to the 1400-year-old Ptolemaic system and believed that the sun
revolved around the earth. It was later challenged by Polish astronomer Nicolas
Copernicus (1473-1543) who opined that the earth and other planets revolve
around the sun. Thirty-seven years after Galileo (1564-1642) made
the first drawings of the moon, the Selenographia, the
first lunar atlas was published by the Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius
(1611-1687).
References
of celestial objects in the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare,
John Donne, John Milton, William Wordsworth, P B Shelley, John Keats, W B
Yeats, T S Eliot, W H Auden, and others have been poetically exemplified.
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light,
(William Wordsworth, Intimations of
Immortality)
The cosmic bodies related to astronomy or heavenly
phenomena (tensoo) have been included in the seven Japanese categories
of haiku and related kigo reference. According to Basho, there are two
planes in haiku: fueki ryuko ie.
Eternal and Current. The cosmic plane relates to haiku that is
associated with nature and landscape. Shiki in his classification has mentioned
‘Nature and Celestial and Earthly’ aspects of haiku.
The following classical hokku by Basho has a
brilliant celestial reference.
ara umi ya
sado ni yokotau
ama no gawa
R H Blyth translates it
into English referring ‘heaven’s river’ as ‘The Milky Way’:
A
wild sea,
And
stretching out towards the island of Sado,
The
Milky Way.
Issa, long ago, had
referred about the concept of astronomy in the following haiku:
how
beautiful!
the
milky way
through
a hole in the curtain
Poet Federico Garcia
Lorca could come to know about haiku in early 1920, and when he was a student
in Madrid he aptly wrote:
Some day…
You will leap from one star
to another.
Monoku is a one-liner poem in brevity and clarity in
expression and its hybridity in origins: a Greek prefix wedded to a Japanese
suffix to create a new English term as put forth by Jim Kacian. According to Jim, "Multiple stops yield subtle,
rich, often ambiguous texts which generate alternative readings, and subsequent
variable meanings. Each poem can be several poems, and the more the
different readings cohere and reinforce each other, the larger the field
occupied by the poem, the greater its weight in the mind.”
Some examples of monostich (one-line poem)
were created by classic ancient Roman author
Marcus Valerius Martialis
(c. 38 and 41 AD – c. 102 and 104 AD). Edward Hirsh in his book ‘A Poet’s Glossary’
narrates, “As the Greek Anthology (tenth century) illustrates, the
monostich can be a proverb, an aphorism, an enigma, a fragment, an image, an
enigma.” Valery Bryusov, Walt Whitman, Edith Thomas, Guillaume Apollinaire, Bill Zavatsky, Emmanuel Lochac, Matsuo-Allard, Ralph Hodgson are
the pioneers of early monoku poems. Valery Bryusov published
the single line poem in 1894 in the Russian language. Guillaume Apollinaire is known as the first
poet to write a one-line poem in his 1913 book Alcools : ‘Poems
1898-1913’ in French.
Emmanuel Lochac published one-liners in French under the title Monostiches in
a literary magazine in 1929. Breunig translated it into English in 1936 and
there has been a celestial reference ‘sun’ in his monoku:
Voilier emportant le soleil
dans les vergues
Schooner
bearing away the sun in its arms
Nobel laureate Rabindranath
Tagore’s one-line poems (monoku like), “The Stray Birds” (1916), are
more of proverbial expressions with poetic lucidity having occasional reference
of celestial bodies.
If you shed tears when you miss
the sun, you also miss the stars.
Late Australian haiku poet, Janice Bostok, also referenced celestial bodies
in her early groundbreaking and influential experimentation with monoku:
first venus then star by star the night deepens
The heavenly bodies are associated with social festivals, beliefs,
auspicious occasions, protections from evils, etc. The celestial entities of haiku writing can broadly be
correlated to poetic inquisitiveness, human behavior, historical events,
spiritual credence, and socio-cultural aspects.
The monoku have been selected to showcase the
poetic spirit associated with the celestial bodies.
-
Pravat Kumar Padhy
Per Diem for
November 2019: Celestial Bodies (Monoku)
out beyond the lit night
sky meteor belief
--Jim Kacian
*****
recharging the Limbic system I
bark at Canis Minor
--Johannes S. H. Bjerg
*****
stop press methane on mars has
legs
--Helen
Buckingham
*****
dark matter the dreams i cling to
--Brendon Kent
*****
snow on the sun
navigating childhoods
--Alan
Summers
*****
where
roads end the Milky Way
--Sonam Chhoki
*****
warm night my pocket full of stars
--Anna Cates
*****
Venus rising a shore behind your ear
--Alegria
Imperial
*****
super beginning and end nova
--Anna Maris
*****
bare trees black against
the stars falling into
--Sandi Pray
*****
a cloud passing through
the moon passing through a cloud
--Ernest Wit
*****
deep winter my son invents
new constellations
--Stephen Toft
*****
from horizon to horizon the milky way
--Michael Dylan Welch
*****
northern lights I reveal the galaxy within
*****
a curl of eyelash on your pillow crescent moon
--Debbie Strange
--Debbie Strange
*****
distant stars in constellation a child in view
--Kala Ramesh
*****
typecast as a verb the moon tonight
--Shloka Shankar
*****
in spite of your silence the birth of stars
--Deborah P Kolodji
*****
the forest disappears into
itself new moon
--Michael Rehling
*****
falling in love under the stars over the moon
--dl mattila
*****
the moons of Jupiter this is a life I didn’t know existed
--Melissa
Allen
*****
caterpillars leaf-lacing the
universe black holes and worm holes
--Marianne Paul
*****
her curves in the hands of the moon
--Don Baird
*****
between wound and weapon the milky way
--Lee Gurga
*****
space
dust another term for static
--Robert Kingston
*****
the farmers in the core of the sun are butterfly wings in
rain
--Ken Sawitri
*****
planets around their campfire
in the cold
--Michael Nickels-Wisdom
*****
climbing on the roof the lilac branches punching the moon
--Florin Golban
*****
a new galaxy the back of
my eyeball
--Mark Gilbert
*****
pine incense placed upon a
cliff between Andromeda and Saturn
--Jim Wilson
--Jim Wilson
*****
No comments:
Post a Comment