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 independently, were written in the context of renku. Shiki formally separated his new style of verse from the context of collaborative poetry. Being agnostic, he also separated it from the influence of Buddhism. Further, he discarded the term "hokku" and proposed the term "haiku" as an abbreviation of the phrase ""haikai no ku"" meaning a verse of "haikai", although the term predates Shiki by some two centuries, when it was used to mean "any" verse of haikai. Since then, "haiku" has been the term usually applied in both Japanese and English to all independent haiku, irrespective of their date of