Lesson on page twoQuickly—let us get startedMind—stop wanderingThat is a haiku, a 500-year-old Japanese poetic form whose first and
last lines always have five syllables, its middle line seven. Today,
grade school teachers in the U.S. are turning to it as a new tool to
teach English composition. Asked to write their own haiku , children find that its precise rules and free content pose
delightful puzzles, with solutions limited only by the flexibility of
their vocabulary and the fetters on their fancy.For the most part, haiku in English have been either translations of old
Japanese poems or originals that closely imitated Oriental terms and
themes. Convinced that the form had other possibilities, Mrs. Maeve O'Reilly
Finley, a bouncy, Irish-born fourth-grade teacher in the
innovation-minded public schools of Newton, Mass., began writing her
own versions of haiku for her students in 1962. Her Haiku for You, a
thin volume of 101 haiku for children, was published this summer.Mrs. Finley's haiku deal with such close-to-childhood subjects as kites,
tadpoles, animals and birthdays. They also deal with modern
communications:Monster presses roll—Letters-to-words-to-stories-A newspaper born and with city life:Tall city buildingsShadowboxing each otherFrom the bouncing sunIn her classes, Mrs. Finley starts by having her students read a haiku
together, clapping in unison with the syllables, and then individually
describe the images the poem conveys. To set them off on their own
haiku, she gives them the first two lines, asks them to supply a third.
The responses often reflect the down-to-earth quality of children's
imaginations. Once, for example, she gave her daughter the linesOn a class picnicMy friend CuriosityInstead of an ethereal poetic sentiment, the daughter wroteAte six sandwichesAn eight-year-old girl, asked to compose a haiku about church, wrote:Pillars strong and straightPeople dressed in Sunday clothesChild bored from sermonMrs. Finley arms her students with a dictionary and a Roget's Thesaurus,
finds that both become thoroughly thumbed as the children seek synonyms
to fit the rigid line scheme, stretching their vocabularies. To keep
them searching, she bans such overworked words as fine, nice, pretty
and good. Mrs. Finley is not alone in trying to teach writing in 17
hard syllables: the National Council of Teachers of English reports
that haiku are turning up in classrooms throughout the country.
Creating a haiku, teachers have found, expands a child's imagery,
provides a quick sense of accomplishment because of its brevity. But
the basic appeal of a haiku, says Mrs. Finley, is that “it is poetry,
and children love poetry—they love to paint word pictures.”
