re:Virals 537

Welcome to re:Virals, The Haiku Foundation’s weekly commentary feature on some of your favorites among the best contemporary haiku and senryu written in English.  In the host chair today is Keith. This week’s poem, chosen by Richard Straw was:

   
my wife left me
does this heavy rain at dusk
  fall where she is
—Jerry Gill
Frogpond XIX:1, May 1996

Introducing this poem, Richard writes:

This haiku is put forward in honor of Valerie Gill (February 8, 1930, to March 1, 2024). She is the late wife of my longtime friend and haiku pen pal, Jerry Gill. May her memory be for a blessing.

Jerry Gill’s haiku above was written and published a long while (a quarter of a century at least) before his wife actually died. Given that, the poem could be about a trial separation the couple once underwent, a temporary absence they experienced because she went on a trip by herself, or even the death of a former wife. I do not know the original details behind this poem, but in the end such details do not really matter. A haiku is made significant, even poignant, by the current circumstances of its readers.

Few readers think less of Yosa Buson (or his haiku) after learning that his wife Tomo was still alive when he wrote one of his most famous haiku, and that she outlived him by 31 years. Here is Buson’s haiku from 1777, and its pain and coldness can still be felt:

piercingly cold
stepping on my dead wife’s comb
in the bedroom
Buson tr. Haruo Shirane

Host comment (Keith):

This verse appeared in a period when many anglophone haikuists were still writing in a longer form, and trying to emulate the approach of older Japanese verses, just as the trend for more minimalist verses was setting in. Viewed now, it raises several points.

The self-interrogative mode is a device that conspicuously opens the verse to the reader.

The symbolism is itself rather heavy. “Rain” as a single word can suggest many moods from joy (spring rain) through relief (summer’s evening downpour relieving heat, or summer rain lifting drought) to gloom (especially cold, autumn or winter rain). There’s no season in this verse to provide a clue as to which. The author leaves us in no doubt with “heavy” rain and “at dusk” —the end of the day, the disappearance of the light. He is indubitably very glum.

Again, we are in no doubt that the gloom is occasioned by his wife leaving. The “heavy rain at dusk” accentuates his dolour. Thus the question is not whether it is actually raining where she is but whether his ex feels the misery that he does. Clearly, he rather hopes so! The alternatives could be that she feels joy in liberation from him; or, just as crushing, indifference.

Citing Buson’s well-known verse, Richard raises the matter of authenticity. But for his introductory remarks, we wouldn’t know whether this week’s poet was sharing a genuine event or making it up. We still don’t, but now there’s a strong element of doubt. Does it matter? I tend to think it does, a little. Does knowing from context that Buson made up the circumstance of his dead wife’s comb detract from the impact of the verse? For me, yes. It becomes less a haiku/senryu and more an imaginative haiku-like poetic exercise, albeit an effective one. These days one suspects, perhaps unworthily, that many haiku that obviously play on an emotion, rather than evoking it in a detached way through real and present images, are made up. When we read a first-person verse about abuse and bruises and a painful divorce, and a few days later see the poet announcing on social media her umpteenth anniversary married to a wonderful husband,  about which no senryu or haiku was written, what are we to think? Appropriation? Or a poet assuming the mantle on behalf of the afflicted known to them?  Or invention? Perhaps it’s better when we have no information. I leave that thorny subject to you!

Meanwhile, having been separated towards the end of my first marriage, now long ago, I know that we were both damaged by the experience, but the damage would have been greater and more enduring had we not separated. The misery was shared.  I wouldn’t choose rain as the metaphor, for rain is a passing phenomenon, where the damage from a failed marriage, particularly if there are children, is more permanent.  Even if subsequently one gets along with the other well enough.

Urszula Marciniak:

You might think the husband wants to punish his wife for abandoning him by soaking her in the pouring rain. But I sense he still wants to feel close to his wife, standing in the same rain. He believes the water will cool their emotions, wash away their guilt, and restore blissful peace. He likely still worries about her and wants to shield her from the downpour and the dangers lurking in the darkness. Maybe he’ll have another chance; maybe after the pouring rain and the long night, the sun will rise—one for both of them—and they’ll want to close the distance

Radhamani Sarma:

A write of pain, where the writer’s inward feeling in the first person, a form of confession, helpless, reaches the audience. Weaving the natural images of ” heavy rain” and “dusk” the writer infuses symbolism. He is in the doldrums; and poses a question, maybe out of introspection: does this heavy rain at dusk / fall where she is…are both of them in a similar position, facing trials and tribulations, emotional stress. Does she undergo the same feeling of separation. Especially at dusk, when the spirits are at lowest ebb, will rain be a reconciling or unifying source? Or with their oneness gone, now each alone on a voyage of misery?

Another inference possible is that DISTANCE plays a crucial roll in his concept; perhaps she is far away, or he does not know about her whereabouts ; now his query is that will the same rain heavy fall with its mercy or emotional stress where she is; is there any chance of reuniting now; is there the same line of thinking positively on her side, or is she for negation?
A very poignant write of many sided approaches of close observation

Sudha Devi Nayak:

The first line of the haiku is a cold statement of fact delivered to us with a deadpan finality. There is no hint of possibility of her return. It put me in mind not very appropriately of “Maman died today” in Albert Camus’s novel “The Stranger”. The emotional distance and indifference to the significance of the event definitely does not touch this haiku. Just the presentation . The next two lines tell us in deep contrast how greatly the protagonist of the haiku is affected by the departure of his wife.

There is poignancy in the thought of whether the heavy rain also falls wherever she is. The downpour sets the tone to his feelings, bereft after she leaves him, and he must be wondering whether she has qualms of conscience about leaving him. At the moment there is nothing between them except the rain that could be bringing home to her some of the loneliness and despair he is feeling. We do not know what prompted her to leave, perhaps an act of faithlessness or a tired marriage slowly falling apart.

In a tangential reference I am also reminded of “Meghdoot”, the epic lyric of Kalidas the Sanskrit poet, where a yaksha (nature spirit) banished by his master to a remote region asks a cloud to carry his message of love to his wife.
The theme of longing love and seperation belongs here too and the haiku is a heartfelt dedication to his wife

Orense Nicod—not knowing the answers:

This is a powerful piece and what a pleasure to read this confessional gem, which feels autumnal in its melancholy even without a kigo. The first line, “my wife left me,” is almost brutally plain. No cushioning: the emotional shock is delivered instantly, and that bareness is crucial. It earns the lyricism that follows. Then the poem pivots on the question: “does this heavy rain at dusk / fall where she is.” On the surface, it’s meteorological; emotionally, it’s about continuity and severance. The speaker is asking whether the world is still shared.

When the speaker asks whether the rain falls where she is, he’s probing whether that most basic layer of togetherness still exists. Not love, not understanding: just mutual exposure to the world. Weather is the smallest social common denominator. It is what remains when everything else has been stripped away. The smallest social bond has snapped, and the poem marks that loss by reaching for the one thing people reach for when there’s nothing else left to say: the rain.

In everyday life, talking about the weather is almost contentless. In the poem, that contentlessness becomes brutal. The speaker no longer has access to even the most banal shared utterance. The weather, which normally erases difference, now measures it. The distance is measured in unknowability. Do we still live in a world that overlaps at all?

When even that becomes uncertain, the rupture is total, almost ontological.

Pathetic fallacy is traditionally understood as the attribution of human emotion, intention, or inner states to the non-human world, most often to weather or landscape, so that nature appears to mirror or participate in human feeling. In lyric poetry, this has commonly taken the form of explicit metaphor or personification, where external conditions are made to stand in for emotional states.

To describe what is happening in this poem, however, I want to introduce a term of my own: negative space pathetic fallacy. I do so because the poem neither employs pathetic fallacy in its traditional declarative form nor merely restrains it as a rhetorical option. Instead, the figure is displaced from language into experience. The fallacy does not reside in what the poem asserts, but in what the poem causes the reader to undergo.

Neither side of the haiku is figurative on its own. “My wife left me” is stark, literal, and stripped of metaphor. “Heavy rain at dusk” remains observational and meteorological. However, rain is the archetypal pathetic fallacy, and “Heavy” and “at dusk” are not neutral descriptors. They are emotionally primed details. They invite the reader to read symbolically after L1’s statement of loss. We recognize the rain is sad. We recognize that dusk functions as an ending—and a suitably unresolved one: light is leaving, but night has not yet arrived. That mirrors the emotional state perfectly. Separation has occurred, but attachment has not extinguished.

What invites emotional projection is not either element in isolation, but their juxtaposition. The cut becomes the site where pathetic fallacy occurs, not as statement, but as cognitive reflex. Faced with emotional rupture on one side and emotionally primed weather on the other, the reader instinctively supplies a correspondence the poem itself never claims.

In this sense, pathetic fallacy is structural and experiential rather than rhetorical. The poem does not assert that nature mirrors grief; it creates the conditions under which the reader momentarily feels as though it might. This effect is not ornamental or symbolic, but cognitive. In moments of loss, the mind reaches outward, searching for continuity, for confirmation that the world is still shared. Weather becomes the most basic test of that continuity.

This is why the poem avoids sentimentality without adopting the false austerity often mistaken for honesty. The emotional charge is real, but it is not authored by metaphor. Rain and dusk do not perform grief; they simply stand adjacent to it. The poem relies on the reader’s ingrained habit of projecting inner states onto the external world, then withholds any confirmation that such projection can restore connection. The result is not consolation, but exposure.

The emotional force of the poem depends on this operation in negative space. If there were no emotionally charged weather, the question does this rain fall where she is would be trivial. With the stage set, the question becomes devastating. The distance isn’t just physical separation; it is separation at the very moment when shared feeling would matter most. The weather supplies the emotional charge. Distance supplies the emotional meaning. Without the first, the second would be thin. Without the second, the first would be cheap. The poem’s intelligence lies in letting the negative space pathetic fallacy do just enough work to make the distance legible. The poem does not collapse inner and outer worlds; it holds them apart just long enough for the reader to feel the ache of their possible alignment and its failure. The weather remains weather. The grief remains unshared. The tension is sustained rather than resolved: a supremely haiku move.

What many haikuists who belong to prescriptive camps miss is that figures of speech are not artificial impositions on experience. They arise because they correspond to how cognition, perception, and emotion actually work. They don’t decorate experience; they compress and encode it. Haiku’s task is not to abolish them, but to bring them back into contact with this moment, where their truth can be felt or found wanting. I appreciate that Gill plays with pathetic fallacy and doesn’t reject it as false. Instead, he tests it and makes a moment out of it as it comes alive. Figures of speech in haiku are high-risk, high-reward instruments, and that’s precisely why the masters use them so deliberately.

This haiku is also a good illustration of why clichés are useful in haiku and even sometimes necessary. The rain, dusk, and departure are familiar emotional signposts. The imagery is cliché, just as pathetic fallacy is often cliché, but here these clichés work precisely because the poem isn’t about them and because they serve a purpose. The poem’s true subject is the impossibility of shared experience: the rupture that even the most universal emotional cues cannot bridge. This is all the more poignant in the face of cliché and pathetic fallacy, which are about sharing and collapsing distance. Cliché and pathetic fallacy are inherently communal devices, widely shared codes that assume a world in which emotion is legible and experience is mutually intelligible. In a way, the poem explores the conditions of pathetic fallacy itself. It asks: can our grief inhabit a common space, or has separation made even nature an unreliable witness? The poem brings in these shared codes not to affirm communion, but to show its failure. That’s why the loss feels so sharp.

If the poem used idiosyncratic imagery, the distance would feel expected. But because it uses the most common emotional denominators, the separation becomes devastating. The speaker isn’t cut off from something obscure or private; he’s cut off from the very mechanisms by which humans usually connect.

As a note on punctuation, I personally feel the question mark is not like other punctuation. Periods, commas, and so on mainly organize syntax or rhythm. A question mark, however, performs an act. It doesn’t just shape the sentence; it asserts intention. It changes the ontology of the utterance, and in a haiku I often find its absence to be distracting and unnatural.

However, I like its absence in this poem. It removes address. The utterance is no longer oriented outward and has no vector. It’s not that the speaker doesn’t expect an answer; it’s that he no longer knows where an answer could land.

In that sense, the poem isn’t asking “does this rain fall where she is” so much as discovering that the question itself cannot complete its arc. Syntax becomes a site of loss. Without the question mark, the poem feels less like a spoken question and more like an interior wondering, almost a thought that trails off rather than a request for an answer. That fits perfectly with the theme of the poem, the impossibility of sharing.

So the punctuation choice mirrors the relational rupture. With a question mark: Does this heavy rain at dusk fall where she is? The poem becomes more outward, more conversational, more resolvable, even if the answer is “I don’t know.” Without it, the question is suspended; it never quite leaves the speaker and becomes another form of distance. That’s why it doesn’t call attention to itself here. It aligns with the poem’s deepest logic. In many poems, removing the question mark breaks speech; but here it reveals broken speech.

In my opinion, the functionality of the lack of a question mark in this poem is actually an argument as to why it shouldn’t disappear entirely from haiku writing. Meaning depends on contrast. If no punctuation becomes the default, then absence can no longer do work. It becomes invisible convention, not choice. And as a form that needs to be responsive to fulfill its essence of capturing the moment, haiku needs options, not prohibitions.

Thanks to all who sent commentaries. As the contributor of the commentary reckoned best this week, Orense has chosen next week’s poem, which you’ll find below. We invite you to write a commentary to it. It may be short, or of moderate length, academic, your personal response, spontaneous, or idiosyncratic.  As long as it focuses on the verse presented, and with respect for the poet, all genuine reader reaction, criticism, and pertinent discussion is of value.   Out-takes are kept in the THF Archives.  Best of all, the chosen commentary’s author gets to pick the next poem.

Anyone can participate. Simply use the re:Virals commentary form below to enter your commentary on the new week’s poem (“Your text”) by the following Tuesday midnight, Eastern US Time Zone, and then press Submit to send your entry. The Submit button will not be available until Name, Email, and Place of Residence fields are filled in. We look forward to seeing your commentary and finding out about your favourite poems.

Poem for commentary:

     
whale songs . . .
when did we stop
talking
— Bud Cole, Frogpond 34.1, 2011
(Museum of Haiku Literature Award)

Footnote:

Alas a glitch in the schedule meant that we didn’t have time to try to contact Jerry Gill for an author’s comment, perhaps via Richard, but hope that he will comment in the thread below.

From searches online, Jerry Gill of Hertford, North Carolina, has been a productive writer of haiku and haibun for many years, especially in the period 1990s to 2014, with work appearing in Simply Haiku, Frogpond, and Haibun Today. A book, New Haiku (and Three Haibun) was published in 2009.

A short while after the above verse appeared, another haiku was published in Frogpond 19:2 in the same year:

running this road
i see no one
autumn dusk
—Jerry Gill

Which honkadori reminded me of:

この道や行く人なしに秋の暮
kono michi ya / yuku hito nashi ni / aki no kure

this road
no one travels
autumn dusk
—Bashō

Concerning shared precipitation, there’s another haiku by Bashō that is both reflective in a transient way, uses the interrogative mode, and deals with friendship and implies separation.  It displays complex and subtle suggestive layering in what on the face of it is a simple haiku shared with his friend, Etsujin.  Before the end of the verse (ka – marking a question – inviting the reader to return to the verse for reflection), there’s only a semantic cut.

二人見し雪は今年も降りけるか
futari mishi / yuki wa kotoshi mo / furikeru ka

the snow that we both saw
has it fallen again
this year?

—–

Thanks to Orense for a very long but thought-provoking commentary: and welcome to re:Virals. I’m not sure that I see the associations, connotations, or metaphor of heavy rain at dusk as a form of ‘negative space pathetic fallacy’.  I see ‘pathetic fallacy’ in a traditional way. That an image summons up emotions in a viewer or reader has little to do with the notion that a non-living thing is falsely imbued with those emotions.  As Chiyo-ni put it: “loneliness / lies within the listener / little cuckoo.”

That said, I think I can see what Orense means — discussion welcome as always.  To state in a verse that the moon pities us is the pathetic fallacy.  To state that the moon is indifferent is, at face value, a fact.  However, as Lorin Ford pointed out to me earlier in re:Virals, to state that the moon is indifferent does imply that it ‘might’ have some sympathetic emotion in other circumstances, therefore by leaving that thought unquashed, falling into the same ‘trap.’  Is this what you would mean by ‘negative space pathetic fallacy,’ Orense?

Lastly, Orense’s last sentence: “…haiku needs options, not prohibitions.” Hear, hear!

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