Louise Morey Bowman, a Canadian poet from Quebec who published in the early decades of the twentieth century, belonged to a generation of writers eager to replace Victorian decoration with the clean lines of Imagism. Her sequence “Twelve Hokku on a Canadian Theme” borrows the Japanese hokku—the form later known as haiku—and places it on North American streets. In the seventh piece, she frames a single fleeting instant: “On city pavements / Two muffled, sombre nuns pace, / Behind laughing girls.”
The scene is small enough to hold in one breath. It sets two kinds of female life side by side, or rather one behind the other. The nuns are “muffled” and “sombre,” their bodies wrapped in heavy cloth and their presence hushed. The word “muffled” does double work: it describes their clothing and also suggests that their voices, even their identities, are dampened. They “pace,” a verb that carries disciplined repetition, a measured rhythm rather than spontaneous movement. Ahead of them are “laughing girls.” The girls are not described physically at all; they exist only through their laughter, which makes them seem unburdened and alive. The word “behind” is the hinge. The nuns are not walking with the girls, nor in front of them as guardians or teachers. They follow at a distance, separated by an invisible gap. The central insight is not simply that youth and age, or joy and solemnity, exist in the same city. It is that the pavement can hold both worlds without resolving the distance between them. The poem leaves that gap open, allowing a reader to feel how strange and poignant it is.
Bowman compresses this contrast into the strict frame of the hokku. The syllable count follows the Japanese pattern closely: five, seven, five. Each line carries a distinct visual unit. “On city pavements” grounds the image in an urban setting—hard, public, modern—rather than in the nature imagery traditional to Japanese hokku. The second line introduces the two nuns and their slow “pace,” and the comma after “pace” creates a brief pause, a turning point. The third line releases the poem’s energy with “laughing girls,” ending on the bright sound of “girls” rather than on the sombre nuns. The absence of a final period keeps the moment unresolved, as if the sidewalk scene could continue. The rhythm also shifts subtly: the heavy, nasal sounds of “muffled, sombre nuns” slow the middle line, while the alliteration of “laughing” and “girls” lightens the closing line. Bowman does not explain why the nuns are there or what the girls are laughing about. The power of the hokku lies in that refusal to comment.
The poem’s significance goes beyond its delicate craft. It belongs to an early moment in Canadian modernism when writers were testing Eastern forms against local material. A Canadian street, with its Catholic nuns and schoolgirls or young working women, becomes a legitimate subject for the hokku. The poem also quietly observes women’s lives: the covered, silent nuns and the laughing girls represent two possible ways of moving through the world, and the poem does not force a judgment between them. That restraint makes the image feel alive. The reader is left with the sound of laughter and the quiet pace of muffled feet on city pavements, two rhythms sharing the same ground but never quite meeting.