Over the scaffold
by the side of the girls’ school
a big butterfly net

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The unity of this haiku is as powerful and subtle as the Prussian blue that unites the waves, Mount Fuji, and the fishermen returning home with their catch in Katsushika Hokusai’s great woodblock print “Under the Wave off Kanagawa.” The pigment, then newly available from China to Japanese artists, stands for the early light of morning. As the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji developed, Hokusai introduced other colors to represent the changing lights of the progressing day. When the series was published, Hokusai was seventy-one. Our haiku too possesses the air of having been written by an author of advanced age.

 

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