Lewis Alexander, an African American poet and playwright associated with the Harlem Renaissance, wrote a series of spare verses called Japanese Hokku. In the 1920s, writers of that movement often reached beyond familiar European forms, and Alexander adapted the hokku — the three-line, seventeen-syllable predecessor of the haiku — to express moments of concentrated feeling. The twelfth piece in the sequence reads:
Sitting by the pool,
I looked in and saw my face.
O that I were blind!
At first, the situation looks calm enough. A speaker sits beside water, glances down, and notices a reflection. The opening line establishes a quiet, almost meditative mood: “Sitting by the pool” places the body at rest, while the water suggests stillness and depth. Then the second line introduces an ordinary act of looking. The verbs “looked” and “saw” are straightforward, yet they carry the poem’s entire drama. The speaker does not merely catch a glimpse; he looks in deliberately and sees his own face. The word “face” falls at the end of the line, so the reader, like the speaker, must pause on that image. The final line detonates the calm: “O that I were blind!” The abrupt, archaic “O” turns the poem into something like a prayer or a cry. The subjunctive “were” makes it a wish that cannot be fulfilled, and “blind” clashes violently with “saw” from the line before.
The absence of rhyme and explanation makes the shock feel immediate. The poem follows the 5-7-5 syllable pattern of a hokku: “Sitting by the pool” has five syllables, “I looked in and saw my face” has seven, and “O that I were blind!” has five. That tight shape forces Alexander to strip the experience down to its essence: a pool, a face, a wish for blindness. There is no room to tell us why the speaker feels this way, and that is precisely the poem’s power. The cause remains private, but the emotion is unmistakable. The speaker does not wish the pool were empty or the reflection different; he wishes his own sight were gone. The problem is not the mirror but the self who cannot bear to see.
Because Alexander was a Black writer during the Harlem Renaissance, the face in the water has often been read in racial terms. In an era when Black Americans were routinely taught to feel ashamed of their appearance, seeing one’s face could become a confrontation with a society’s distorted mirror. Yet Alexander deliberately leaves the poem open enough to speak beyond any single identity. The pain of self-recognition is universal: anyone who has flinched at a photograph, avoided a mirror, or felt estranged from their own body can feel the weight of those final words. The poem captures the way self-image can turn from simple knowledge into self-rejection.
The imagery of the pool also reverses the myth of Narcissus. In Greek myth, Narcissus sees his reflection in water and falls in love with it. Alexander’s speaker sees his reflection and cannot tolerate it. That inversion gives the poem its sting. The pool becomes a cruel mirror, not because the water distorts the face, but because it shows the truth too clearly. The speaker’s desire to be blind is a refusal of self-knowledge, even though the knowledge has already arrived.
What makes “Japanese Hokku 12” significant is its proof that a borrowed form can carry intense personal and cultural feeling. The hokku’s brevity is not a limitation here; it is a discipline. In three short lines, Alexander creates a complete psychological arc: stillness, seeing, and suffering. The leap between the second and third lines works like the cut in Japanese hokku, a sudden shift that opens a space of meaning. That space is filled with the reader’s own sense of what it means to look at oneself and wish, just for a moment, to un-see.