A chapter in a fanfiction reminded me of an old philosophical point about contradictions and tautologies—that they imply everything else. Lawful systems stand and fall as a whole; you cannot magically suppress fire without suppressing cellular respiration and human life. And so, in some sense, all our actions result in consequences that could one day by examined and tracked back to their unique sources (chaos be damned).

Thinking this, and looking into the falling snow, I thought through a haiku (5-7-5):

This sounded familiar to me, though I didn’t think I had been quoting anyone. Eventually, I remembered Shotetsu’s “Snow in a Garden”¹

A very nice waka; truly conveying a sad mood but with appreciation of the beauty of winter and the hope of spring. If one must copy, copy the best.

But the haiku needs work. The first line is solid: the rhythm of ‘lie and truth’ works better than ‘truth or lie’, and it meets its 5-syllable count with aplomb. The second line is awkward, even if you ignore the enjambment. ‘All snow’ may convey a sense that nothing is irretrievable, which is an appropriate sentiment, but sounds odd enough that it breaks the flow. Expanding it would let us be less gnomic and keep each line separate, but we daren’t touch the perfect first line. Let’s try this expanded waka (5-7-5-7-6):

In line 3, the intention is ‘remains for us to find’, but that blows the 5-syllable count; ‘for to find’ is actually valid English, but it’s archaic or British dialectical (if one looks in Google Books, Edmund Spenser comes up as a user of that phrase lo those many centuries ago). It’s curious, but such linguistic oddities are par for the course in poetry, so perhaps it’s not a flaw. The more I read it, the more charm it has for me in a sort of wabi-sabi way, which is appropriate for the verse-form. (It was suggested that it be rewritten as ‘remains here to find’ or ‘remains there to find’, but in a way, no ‘here’ or ‘there’ has been specified for the lies & truths to reside within, and we do want to keep a distinction between the speaker/addressed and the snowbanks of time—“the past is a foreign country”², after all.)

‘human’ is fairly rare in poems, because usually you can come up with a better phrase. In this case, we’re stuck. We could switch to ‘man’ or ‘men’ and that would let us stick in a short adjective like ‘warm’:

But to me, that seems like a narrowing of scope that isn’t in line with the universal sentiments. Why men? Are women grown honest? The synonym ‘people’ sounds even worse than ‘humans’:

Pronouns aside, there are two problems here.

1. The metaphor for time is not clear. We know that the idea is the past is cold, and the further in the past, the colder and more frozen the lies & truths (this is not a new metaphor; consider the phrase cold case). It’s a good metaphor, since you can still dig things out of the snow, and things return when the snow melts (this is why Shōtetsu, a Zen Buddhist, uses the imagery after all). But time doesn’t instantly suggest it—the ‘covering’ could just be a blanket or something.

2. We lost our most important line—the punchline, if you will. It’s a double-edged sword, one that can reassure or disquiet: the truth is out there. Darst you find it?³ We try again (5-7-5-7-7):

A little more explicit about the metaphor: ‘snowy’ is pretty much a winter word if ever there was one, and we capitalize Time to make the hypostatization clearer.

Sometimes you have to give up; I have a nice haiku which I have thought a great deal about but have been entirely unable to make it a full 5-7-5 haiku⁴. But fortunately, we’re not done. Around here, it occurred to me that line 2 did have a redundant word: ‘that’. It makes as much sense to write ‘Every lie or truth / we humans ever say’ as it did to write ‘Every lie or truth / that we humans ever say’; freeing up a syllable then suggests we spend it on more interesting pronouns, which leads to:

This is a very nice change, because it eliminates the whole debate over ‘we humans’, makes the poem simultaneously intimate (it’s just you and me, buckaroo) and universal (the speaker could be anyone, and likewise the addressed), renders the poem less harshly judgmental of its readers (I too am guilty of not seeking all truths and destroying all lies), and smuggles in variety.

The meaning is still somewhat obscure overall thanks to the last line. Perhaps we ought to go with a more conventional visual description: ‘darksome’? ‘cloudy’? ‘obscure’? Or perhaps the last line is too limp and abstract—‘if we will but dig for them’? ‘If we scratch the dirt’? Perhaps that is too concrete. ‘If we exhume them’ smacks of the grave and doesn’t go well with the ice/snow imagery. There aren’t many verbs that deal specifically with ice & snow; ‘melt’ is a good one, but ‘if we will but melt them’? No no, perhaps ‘if we will melt the ice’, and then tweak the ‘snowy’ to another 2-syllable word like ‘icy’ or ‘freezing’:

The repetition of ‘icy’/‘ice’ doesn’t work for me. Even if we move ‘icy’ even further away, it still sounds odd:

(And no, the old poetic standby ‘rimy’ is even worse. We must give up on ‘snowy’ and ‘icy’.)

So: