the day’s gentle start lesser celandines
This is the winning haiku, and therefore featured, haiku for April on this year’s Haiku Calendar, still very much worth buying from Snapshot Press, here.
Longstanding readers of my blog will know that I believe Simon Chard is one of the very best English-language haiku poets writing today. This example of his work is deceptively simple. It’s written as a one-liner, but it consists of two almost equal-length parts:
the day’s gentle start
lesser celandines
But haiku written as two lines look a bit odd, don’t they?
It would also have been too awkward to have forced this haiku into three lines, because of that possessive apostrophe:
the day’s
gentle start
lesser celandines
Therefore, from the angle of appearance alone, Chard has undoubtedly made the right call in presenting this moment as a one-line haiku.
But what exactly is this moment? Well, for one thing, it’s really two moments – which presumably are so consecutive as to be all but conflated: the realisation that the (unseen) poet-persona’s day has got off to a gentle, and presumably good, start by way of, perhaps, a woodland walk, and then the noticing of the flowers.
Or, in fact, it could be that the noticing of the flowers preceded the thought and, moreover, triggered it; that the sight of the flowers has slowed the poet down, made him more fully in tune with time and place for a fraction of this spring morning (assuming that he hasn’t been abed until noon or gone!) and enabled him to ease himself into the day.
Either way, this is a poem brimming with optimism.
As readers, we presume, surely, that it’s a sunny morning, with blue skies, and that the sunshine has caused the celandines to unfurl. Their bright yellowness resembles a child’s conception of the sun their petals spoking like the sun’s rays. Richard Mabey, in Flora Britannica (Chatto and Windus, 1996), says that the word celandine
derives from the Greek chelidon, a swallow.’ The sixteenth-century herbalist Henry Lyte suggested that this was because it ‘beginneth to springe and to flower at the coming of the swallows’. But most celandines are in flower long before the swallows arrive, and it looks as if the lesser celandine may have been confused with the greater celandine, another yellow-flowered but quite unrelated species.
Mabey goes on to venture, quite reasonably, that the name suggests the flower ‘was seen as a kind of vegetable swallow, the flower that, like the bird, signalled the arrival of spring.’
He reminds us too, incidentally, that the flower’s most common alternative English name, historically at least, is pilewort, for its effectiveness against haemorrhoids. Meanwhile, Václav Větvička, in Wildflowers of Field and Woodland (Hamlyn, 1979), states that:
With its numerous tubers, Lesser Celandine is one of those plants which people often used to have to eat in mediaeval days during times of poor harvest or famine. Aptly then, it was called Manna from Heaven. Perhaps it is this historic role which has given rise to the German names Feigwurz, meaning root-fig, and Scharbockskraut (the most common name), a medicine for scurvy (a disease in times of want).
As I’ve written elsewhere, haiku which contain leading statements don’t usually float my boat, because they tell the reader too much. Here, though, the clause ‘the day’s gentle start’ is more like a compound noun – the sort for which German is renowned – than a statement, despite the fact that it does lead the reader in a certain direction. As such, the haiku reads like a succession of nouns which, thanks to the one-line form, elide to become one, in a single, heightened moment of simplicity and gladness. We can easily intuit Chard’s restrained joy. That ease does not make the poem any less effective; on the contrary, it allows the readers to stand in the poet’s shoes or boots and revel in the beauty of a delightful spring morning after the dull days of winter.
Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff 