An infant’s tomb
in Carthage—
rain on the sea
Ban’ya Natsuishi The Pilgrimage
This haiku has great power. Why? Let’s look at the structure of the poem for our answer.
The contrast, the gap, between the fragment and the base is that between the vertical, absolute, circular etc (being) and the contingent event of the child’s tomb (the text that comes to my mind is Herod’s decree that all infants should be killed, etc, from the Gospel story). The beings, the babies emerge from being (the event of tzu-jan) in the poem as a gift (the old humanist trope, gift of time). The rain falling into the sea is a “primordial” image of cosmic exchange, fresh into salt and back out, or cosmic cycle.
And so, through the analogy of being (the babies are analogously raindrops), the gap is crossed, difference recognized, one might say “completed” aesthetically, without being cancelled. The deep rhythm is in the tension between being and beings, the vertical and the contingent worlds.
The power of his poem reflects the difference between the sublime and the beautiful. The horror of the death of children – from Herod to Dostoevsky – is sublime. This pathos (mono no ware) is tremendous (sublime); while the beauty of the total image—the complex of imagery, the analogy, the differences as well as the deferral of any ULTIMATE meaning -- is “infinite” (boundless). The sublime is held steady within the frame of the beautiful.
