I Wrote a Little Haiku
I Wrote a Little Haiku - form Summary
Haiku as Ironic Device
Murray's poem opens with the ironic claim that he "wrote a little haiku," then refuses the form’s brevity by expanding into a vivid, violent vignette about a rifle's lead in a Civil War farm. The poem uses that contrast—small formal label versus extended, gruesome detail—to satirize critics who call work obscure and to show how a terse claim can paradoxically foreground historical and bodily devastation, folding title, military object and landscape together.
Read Complete AnalysesI wrote a little haiku titled ‘The Springfields' Lead drips out of a burning farm rail. Their Civil War. Critics didn't like it, said it was obscure - The title was the rifle both American sides bore, lead was its heavy bullet, the Minié, which tore often wet with blood and sera into the farmyard timbers and forests of that era, wood that, burnt even now, might still re-melt and pour out runs of silvery ichor the size of wasted semen it had annulled before.
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