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These three carefully chosen details create a composite pictorial and musical image, one that is tremendously alive, radiant and enchanting. Each aspect of the scene expresses an inner design or purposefulness which the poet now admits is in stark contrast to his own inner mood. As he observes the birds flying with obvious intent to reach their unknown land, he reflects that his hopes have no such sure destination. While all around him affirms movement and meaning, the poet can find no corresponding impulse in his own life. He concludes with the deliberately plain and candid line, "Slowly my life's evening sets in." The poignant melancholy of this understatement, the quiet sadness from which it springs and the degree of detachment which makes such truthful utterance possible, afford us a sudden inroad into the speaker's consciousness. We see a man with the alert, refined awareness of an artist, but an artist who is alienated from the objects of his perceptions. We feel him, with the resignation of age, observing the slow advance of the final stage of his life. His "evening," with its unfulfilled and unspoken hopes and longings, is in striking contrast to this mysterious and beautiful scene. The silent, pervading gloom of his night subsumes the poem's close. The image we retain is of a man with his face turned skywards, itself an image of yearning, who is aesthetically immersed in the beauty of the scene around him, but whose spiritual or psychic response is one of even more acute isolation. It is as if the scene has allowed him to penetrate to a far greater depth of emotion, a depth which manifests itself in and through the very subtlety of his descriptive powers. All other action is suspended or withheld in order that the poet might awaken this inner contemplative depth.
It is this same procedure that distinguishes the Haiku writings of the Japanese tradition. Basho and others succeed in balancing our attention for an instant on that point where outer perception is met by inner response. The Haiku poet commonly sketches the outer situation in a few swift and often symbolic "brushstrokes." The inner response of the reader is sudden and impromptu in character. The result is a lightning fusion of ideas and parts in a single, sharply focussed image. The important feature of Haiku is that this fusion takes place largely in the mind of the reader. The poet supplies the formula for that experience in his selection of quintessential details but he observes what
Northrop Frye refers to as
a convention of pure projected detachment, in which an image, a situation, or a mood is observed with all the imaginative energy thrown outward to it and away from the poet.[4]
