Hokku 37 — Summary

Yone Noguchi’s three-line “Hokku 37” longs for a strange, joyful disappearance. The speaker imagines becoming a “tree-man,” a being halfway between human and tree, rooted in earth but open to air. The middle line turns wind into a kind of singer: songs are “given back by the winds,” as if nature had been holding them and now returns them to someone quiet enough to listen. The final line clinches the mood: “What joy of no-man.” This is not loneliness; it is release. To be no one in particular, to lose the burdens of a separate self and blend into the landscape, feels like happiness. The poem has an ecstatic, almost childlike tone — a small burst of wonder at the thought of becoming something quieter and more lasting than a person.