Tanka and haiku are both short Japanese forms, they both count syllables, and neither one rhymes. That is where the similarity ends. Tanka has two more lines than haiku, and those two lines change what the poem is for.
The short answer
| Haiku | Tanka | |
|---|---|---|
| Lines | Three | Five |
| Syllable pattern | 5-7-5 | 5-7-5-7-7 |
| Length | 17 syllables | 31 syllables |
| Usual subject | A moment in nature, observed | Personal feeling: love, grief, gratitude, reflection |
| Where the poet stands | Out of the way | Present in the poem |
| Turning point | The cut (kireji), between two images | The pivot, in line three |
| Season word | Traditionally expected (kigo) | Optional |
| Age | The younger form | The older form, by centuries |
Tanka came first
It surprises people, because haiku is far better known in English, but tanka is the older form. Tanka (also called waka, “short poem”) has been written in Japan for more than thirteen centuries. Haiku grew out of it much later: the opening verse of a linked-verse sequence, the hokku, eventually broke off and stood on its own, and in the late nineteenth century Masaoka Shiki gave that independent poem the name we use today.
So haiku is, in a sense, tanka’s first three lines set free. If you can hear that, the difference between the forms stops being a matter of counting.
What the two extra lines do
A haiku sets two images beside each other and stops. It trusts the reader to feel the spark and does not explain it. The poet’s job is to get out of the way.
Tanka does not stop. After the third line, it turns, and the last two lines say what the moment meant to the person who lived it. That is why tanka carries love letters and grief and gratitude, and haiku usually does not. In a haiku, the self is a window. In a tanka, the self is in the room.
Here is a haiku, the most famous one there is:
an old pond
a frog jumps in
the sound of water
— Matsuo Bashō
Nothing is added. The poem is the pond, the frog, and the sound, and the reader supplies everything else.
Now a tanka:
autumn night
again the clamor of geese
flying away
soon I will be
nobody’s child
— Ruth Holzer
The first three lines could almost be a haiku. Then the poem turns, and the geese become the poet’s own coming loss. Those last two lines are the tanka.
The pivot and the cut
Both forms hinge, but they hinge differently.
Haiku hinges on the cut — the break between the two images, where a Japanese poem would place a cutting word (kireji) and an English one usually places a dash or a line break. The cut separates.
Tanka hinges on the pivot — the third line, which belongs to the two lines above it and to the two lines below it at the same time. The pivot joins. It is the hinge on which the observed world swings around to face the poet.
If you are writing and your third line only points backward, you may have a haiku with padding. If it points both ways, you have a tanka.
So which one are you writing?
Ask what you want the last line to do.
If you want the poem to end on the world — an image, a sound, a season, and no comment — write haiku. If you want it to end on a person, and on what the image cost or gave them, write tanka. The subject does not decide this. The same frog and the same pond can go either way. What decides it is whether you intend to stay out of the poem or step into it.
One more test, from our own reading: tanka are not whimsical. If the feeling underneath the poem is not worth a reader’s silence afterward, the extra two lines will show it.
Keep reading
- What Is Tanka? — the form, the 5-7-5-7-7 pattern, the Tanka Recipe, and examples.
- Tanka Techniques — Teika’s ten tanka styles, with an example of each.
- What Is Haiku? — the same question, asked at our sister journal, Haiku Journal.
- Haiku vs Senryu — the other comparison poets ask about, once this one is settled.