Yone Noguchi’s “Hokku 37” is less a statement than a small event of disappearing. In only three lines, the speaker reaches toward a strange condition: “To become tree-man,” then greets the returning sound of wind as song, and ends on the exclamation “What joy of no-man.” The poem wants to shed the bounded human self, but not through sadness or loss. Its central idea is that there is a peculiar gladness in becoming nameless, in stepping out of the position of “man” as the centre of experience and letting the more-than-human world speak.
The syntax enacts that loosening of identity. The first line is an infinitive phrase left suspended by a comma: “To become tree-man,” not “I want to become.” There is no finite verb, no grammatical subject. A wish normally belongs to someone, but here even the speaker’s “I” has begun to drop away before the wish is completed. The compound “tree-man” suggests a hyphenated, in-between creature—rooted like a tree, yet still shaped by human longing. It is not a metaphor for destruction; it is a figure for a different kind of attention, one that stands still and receives.
Then the second line moves outward with an apostrophe: “Oh, songs given back by the winds!” The “Oh” is not decorative. It is a gasp of recognition, as if the wind had replied. Because the line says “given back,” there is a sense of exchange: something once sent out—perhaps breath, voice, or simply attention—now returns as music. The winds are not background scenery; they are active givers. That reciprocity is key. Only after the speaker imagines becoming a tree-man does the wind’s speech become song. In other words, the world does not become alive; it already is alive, but the human must become less central to hear it.
Noguchi’s sound patterning works as part of the meaning. Long open vowels run through “Oh,” “songs,” “joy,” and “no-man,” while the harder “winds” and “given” create a push of breath. The middle line is the longest, stretching out like a gust, while the first and last lines are shorter and balanced. The poem’s loose 5-8-5 syllable shape recalls the hokku form without depending on a mechanical count in English. There is no rhyme, but the repeated hyphenations—“tree-man” and “no-man”—act as structural rhymes, two composite identities facing each other. The first is something one might try to become; the second is what remains when the trying stops.
The final line, “What joy of no-man,” contains the poem’s turn. If “man” in “tree-man” is still present, “no-man” erases even that residue. But the tone is not one of erasure as violence; it is closer to a sigh of relief. To be no-man is to be unburdened of reputation, biography, ambition, the need to be a distinct and important person. The phrase “What joy” is exclamatory, not lamenting. It insists that this disappearance is desirable. A tree has no name in the human sense, and the wind has no individual self, yet both are continuously expressive. The speaker wants to join that anonymous expressiveness.
That is what makes the poem significant. In a very small space, it reverses a common modern assumption—that the self is the most valuable thing to develop and protect. Instead, the hokku presents self-forgetfulness as a way of becoming more receptive, not less alive. It also demonstrates how much can be done with almost nothing: a suspended wish, one apostrophe, and a final exclamation are enough to carry a whole spiritual argument. The poem does not explain its idea; it performs it. By the end, the absent “I” has become a kind of quiet freedom, and the reader is left with the same invitation the speaker seems to have accepted: to listen to the wind as if we were no longer the main event in the landscape.