Poetic form
What is a Tanka?
Definition
A tanka is a five-line Japanese poem of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables — like a haiku that stays two lines longer to say how it feels.
Tanka is haiku's older relative — over 1,300 years old, filling Japan's earliest anthologies, traded between court lovers as coded correspondence. Five lines of 5-7-5-7-7 sound units: the haiku's familiar opening plus two seven-syllable lines that change everything. Where haiku stops at the image, tanka stays to respond.
The form's hinge is the pivot line, usually the third: it completes the image above and opens the feeling below, belonging to both halves at once. The upper verse observes — plum blossom, winter moon, a sleeve wet with rain — and the lower verse confesses what the image means: longing, memory, the letter that never came. It's the difference between showing someone a photograph and telling them why you kept it.
Structure of a tanka
- Five lines: 5-7-5-7-7 syllables, 31 in all
- Upper verse (lines 1-3): a concrete image, often from nature
- A pivot line — usually line 3 — that swings from observation to emotion
- Lower verse (lines 4-5): the personal response a haiku would leave unsaid
How to write a tanka
- Start as you would a haiku: one concrete image, present tense, no commentary.
- Make line 3 a hinge that could belong to both halves of the poem.
- Use lines 4-5 to answer the image with feeling — longing, memory, a confession.
- Count syllables last; the emotional swing matters more than the arithmetic.
2 tanka examples
Classic and original tanka poems, free to read in full.
Common questions
What is a tanka poem?
A five-line Japanese form of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables — 31 in total — that pairs a vivid image with a personal, emotional response.
What is the difference between a haiku and a tanka?
A tanka is essentially a haiku plus two seven-syllable lines. The haiku stops at the image; the tanka stays to say what the image means to the speaker. Historically, haiku evolved from tanka's opening lines.
How old is the tanka form?
More than 1,300 years — tanka fill the 8th-century anthology Man'yōshū, and Japanese court poets exchanged them as love letters centuries before the haiku existed.