A posteriori

GVS: The abbreviation that linguists and scholars of English use to refer to the Great Vowel Shift. See Great Vowel Shift, above.

GYRE (Latin gyrus, a spiral): A gyre is a spiral or circular motion. W. B. Yeats uses the image of a gyre in "The Second Coming" as his private symbol for the forces of history, taking the idea from medieval falconry. There, the falconer normally allowed the bird to circle outward in increasing distances, but he could not let it spiral out so far that it can no longer hear his commands. In the same way, Yeats thought of history as occuring in two-thousand year cycles, and thought that one such cycle was about to end in the twentieth century. Thus, his image for a world going out of control was that of a falcon moving too far away from the center or the falconer, which might represent God, tradition, morality, or some similar principle. (Note the word gyre is pronounced with an initial /j/ sound; compare with the pronunciation of gyroscope and gyrfalcon.)

HAGIOGRAPHY (Greek, "sacred writing"; also called hagiology): The writing or general study of the lives of Christian saints, either in liturgy or in literature. A single story dealing with the life of a saint is called a vita (plural vitae) or a saint's life. Notable examples of literary vitae include Eusebius of Caesarea's record of Palestinian martyrs (4th century CE), Theodoret's account of Syrian monks (5th century CE); Gregory the Great's accounts of the Italian monks (6th century), the Byzantine Menology or Byzantine Calendar incorporating short saints' lives, the Chronicle of Nestor (c. 1113 CE), and The Golden Legend of Jacobus of Voragine (13th century CE). A calendar that incorporates brief saints' lives is called a menology or a martyrology, and these have been compiled by Heironymian (5th century CE), the Venerable Bede (8th century CE), and Adon and Usuard (9th century CE). Among Protestants, John Foxe's Actes and Monuments (alias The Book of Martyrs), published in 1559, contains both a history of the Christian Church and detailed accounts of martyrs, especially the Protestant victims killed during the reign of Queen Mary ("Bloody Mary"). See vita.

HAIKAI: Another term for haikai renga or renku. See discussion under renku and renga.

HAIKAI RENGA: Another term for renku. See discussion under renku and renga.

HAIKU (plural: haiku, from archaic Japanese): The term haiku is a fairly late addition to Japanese poetry. The poet Shiki coined the term in the nineteenth century from a longer, more traditional phrase, haikai renga no hokku ("the introductory lines of light linked verse"). To understand the haiku's history as a genre, peruse the vocabulary entries for its predecessors, the hokku and the haikai renga or renku.

The haiku follows several conventions:

(1) The traditional Japanese haiku consists of three lines. The first line contains five syllables, the second line contains seven, and the last line five. In Japanese, the syllables are further restricted in that each syllable must have three sound units (sound-components formed of a consonant, a vowel, and another consonant). The three unit-rule is usually ignored in English haiku, since English syllables vary in size much more than in Japanese. Furthermore, in English translation, this 5/7/5 syllable count is occasionally modified to three lines containing 6/7/6 syllables respectively, since English is not as "compact" as Japanese.

(2) The traditional subject-matter is a Zen description of a location, natural phenomona, wildlife, or a common everyday occurrence. Insects and seasonal activities are particularly popular topics. If the subject-matter is something besides a scene from nature, or if it employs puns, elaborate symbols, or other forms of "cleverness," the poem is technically a senryu rather than a haiku. The point was that the imagery presents a "Zen snapshot" of the universe, setting aside logic and thought for a flash of intuitive insight. The haiku seeks to capture the qualities of experiencing the natural world uncluttered by "ideas." Often editors will talk about "the haiku moment"--that split second when we first experience something but before we begin to think about it. (In many ways, this idea might be contrasted usefully with the lyric moment in the English tradition of poetry; see lyric).