Sept haï-kaïs "La petite tortue ...", is only seventeen measures long—the number of syllables in a Japanese haiku. Alexis Roland-Manuel remarked on this "mélodie": "Do not let your modesty make you forget a certain fable by La Fontaine. You hurry slowly, perhaps, but none of your steps are wasted. How many hares envy you!" The harmony is pricked with fine, expressive dissonances. For the third "mélodie", "Le coq ...", the instruments "peck" the melody with appoggiaturas in a spirit similar to that in Ravel's "Histoires naturelles" (1906). According to Andrieu, "Maurice Delage's composition is simple and refined; the composer stays ever attentive
Haiku in English four lines (sometimes known as "haiqua") or longer have been written, some of them "vertical haiku" with only a word or two per line. These poems mimic the vertical printed form of Japanese haiku. The translator Nobuyuki Yuasa considered four lines more appropriate in his translations, being closest to the natural conversational rhythm of the colloquial language of haiku, also that three lines did not carry the weight of hokku and found it impossible to use 'three lines' consistently for his translations. The contemporary poet John Martone has written a vast number of vertical haiku. Haiku have also appeared in