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 languages other than Japanese the Arab haiku poets use the three short lines structure, this has not always been considered as a strict rule. Literary critics in the Arab world have not reached an agreement yet whether the haiku poems written by the young poets can be considered a new form of poetry or merely a different name for the (already popular) flash fiction. In July 2015, the "Poetry Letters Magazine" acknowledged the Arabic haiku as a distinct form of poetry by publishing, for the first time, haiku poems of 11 Arab poets from Syria, Morocco, Iraq, Jordan, and Tunisia. Haiku in languages other