Comparative Analysis of Poetry
Senior 6 · Literature in English
Comparative Analysis of Poetry
Lesson 3 of 5
25 min
Let's begin
Both forms have five lines. One was perfected by poets at the Japanese imperial court more than a thousand years ago, who exchanged poems as love letters and were judged by how well they wrote them. The other became famous in Victorian England through a painter who wrote nonsense to amuse a lord's grandchildren. Comparing them shows that the number of lines tells you very little: what matters is what the lines count, and what they are for.
Ono no Komachi was a ninth-century court poet, later counted among the "Six Poetic Immortals" of Japan. This is one of her most famous poems, first in the original Japanese, written in Roman letters, then in a translation published in 1909:
| Japanese (romanised) | Sound units | Word for word |
|---|---|---|
| Hana no iro wa | 6 | the flower's colour |
| Utsuri ni keri na | 7 | has faded, alas |
| Itazura ni | 5 | in vain |
| Waga mi yo ni furu | 7 | I pass through the world / rain falls on the world |
| Nagame seshi ma ni | 7 | while I gazed lost in thought / during the long rains |
The blossom's tint is washed away
By heavy showers of rain;
My charms, which once I prized so much,
Are also on the wane,—
Both bloomed, alas! in vain.Ono no Komachi (9th century), translated by William N. Porter, A Hundred Verses from Old Japan (1909)
The first line has one extra sound unit, a freedom Japanese poets allowed. The poem turns on two puns: furu means both "to pass time" and "to fall" (of rain), and nagame means both "gazing in reverie" and "long rains". So every line is about the flower and the poet at once. Porter's English cannot keep the puns; he spells out both meanings in separate lines and adds rhyme, which the Japanese does not have.
Here is a tanka written in English for this lesson, keeping the syllable count:
Mist on Kivu's face;
a fisherman's lamp goes out,
one star still burning.
I too have watched through the night
for a boat that did not come.Written by Ganzaa
Edward Lear, an English painter, published A Book of Nonsense in 1846, a collection of comic five-line poems with his own drawings. This is one of the best known:
There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, "It is just as I feared!—
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!"Edward Lear, A Book of Nonsense (1846)
There was a Young Lady of Bute,
Who played on a silver-gilt flute;
She played several jigs
To her uncle's white pigs,
That amusing Young Lady of Bute.Edward Lear, A Book of Nonsense
Definition
| Point | Tanka | Limerick |
|---|---|---|
| Origin | Japanese court poetry, over a thousand years old | English popular verse, made famous by Lear in 1846 |
| Measure | Counts sound units: 5-7-5-7-7 | Counts beats: 3-3-2-2-3 |
| Rhyme | None | AABBA; the rhyme is part of the joke |
| Structure | Image (lines 1–3), pivot, feeling (lines 4–5) | A character (line 1), a situation (2), a quick complication (3–4), a punchline or return (5) |
| Tone | Quiet, reflective, often sad: love, loss, the passing of time | Playful, absurd, fast |
| Key device | Pivot words and double meanings | Comic rhyme, exaggeration, nonsense |
| Relationship with reader | Invites the reader to feel what is left unsaid | Invites the reader to laugh at what is said |
The forms share more than five lines. Both are short enough to be remembered after one hearing, and both were social poems: tanka were exchanged between lovers and friends at court, and limericks were recited aloud to entertain. Both also depend on a turn in the last part. The tanka turns from the world outside to the poet's heart; the limerick turns from a normal situation to an absurd one. In Lear's limericks the last line often repeats the first ("Bute … Bute"), so the poem closes like a circle, whereas later writers preferred to end on a surprise.
Worked example
A model comparative paragraph (point: the ending)
Both forms save their force for the end, but for opposite purposes. Komachi's tanka turns from the flower to herself: by the last line, "Both bloomed, alas! in vain", the faded blossom has become an image of her own lost beauty, and the reader is left with a feeling of regret that the poem does not need to explain. Lear's limerick, by contrast, turns towards the absurd. Its short third and fourth lines speed up the list, "Two Owls and a Hen, / Four Larks and a Wren", and the last line lands the impossible picture of a beard full of nests. Whereas the tanka's final lines deepen the image into feeling, the limerick's final line explodes it into a joke. Yet the Old Man's "It is just as I feared!" has its own small sadness: like Komachi, he is watching something happen to him that he cannot stop.
Tip
Counting syllables in English tanka: clap each syllable as you say the line aloud. "Fish-er-man's" is three; "burn-ing" is two. Many modern English tanka do not keep strictly to 5-7-5-7-7, but in an exam exercise keep the count exact.
Warning
An introduction to Edward Lear's limericks from The Nature of Writing. Listen for the anapestic rhythm, and count the beats in each line.
Practice
Sources and credits
