chilled, heated, or soaked through by its placement into outer landscape, object, or sound. Here is a late poem whose headnote—written by Bashō—defines its image as unequivocably subjective:
“Describing what I feel”
this road
through autumn nightfall—
no one walks it
konomichi o yuku hito nashi ni aki no kure
The haiku describes the poet’s inner state—yet without the explanatory headnote, its words appear no less external than those of the previous poem. How then should it be understood?
To read a haiku is to become its co-author, to place yourself inside its words until they reveal one of the proteus-shapes of your own life. The resulting experience may well differ widely between readers: haiku’s image-based language invites an almost limitless freedom of interpretation. Written near the end of Bashō’s life, “this road” can be read as a poem painting the landscape of loneliness or as a poem looking toward an unnavigable death. It can also be read as direct and immediate self-portrait: the uninhabited autumn evening and empty road may themselves be the poet and what he feels. Understood in this last way, the haiku presents its author as a person outside any sense of the personal self. He has fallen into a world in which there is no walker, only path.
Paths mattered to Bashō, who could—like Wordsworth or John Muir—cover twenty or thirty miles a day by foot. In his youth, it seems he traveled only as circumstances required. In mid-life, he traveled by choice, following the example of earlier poet-wanderers he admired. By the end of his life, his journeying gives off the scent of an irrefusable restlessness, a simple incapacity to stay long at home. In the opening words of “Narrow Road to the Deep North,” a prose and haiku journal describing a trip of roughly 1500 miles undertaken by foot, boat, and horseback at the age of forty-five, Bashō wrote, “The moon and sun are travelers of a hundred generations. The years, coming and going, are wanderers too. Spending a lifetime adrift on boat decks, greeting old age while holding a horse by the mouth—for such a person, each day is a journey, and the journey itself becomes home.”
*
Bashō’s first home was Ueno, a castle town thirty miles southeast of Kyoto. Born there in 1644, and called Kinsaku as a boy, his samurai name was Matsuo Munefusa; he used at least two other pen names (Tōsei, “Green Peach,” was a good choice for a not-quite-ripened poet) before taking the name by which he’s now known. His father, Matsuo Yozaemon was a low-ranking samurai who earned his living by farming. He died in 1656, when Bashō was twelve.
Accounts of Bashō’s life differ widely in their details. Probably a second son with four sisters, Bashō left home to work in the household of the local samurai lord, and grew close to the samurai’s son, Tōdō Yoshitada, two years his elder. When Bashō was twenty, both young men had work chosen for publication in an anthology of local poets. (Printing technology had recently arrived in Japan, and such collections were the first truly popular books.) Each also contributed to a published linked-verse renga—a form of poetry written by more than one person, which Bashō would practice throughout his life.
The traditional form of Japanese poetry for a thousand years had been the five-line tanka (also called waka ), written in the syllable count of 5-7-5-7-7. The shorter haiku form emerged from two variations of that long-standing pattern. In one, a person would write the 5-7-5 syllable opening for a tanka and another then would “cap” it by writing the closing lines. (This was both a literary game and an adaptation of the “capping verses” of Zen, written to express and demonstrate
“Describing what I feel”
this road
through autumn nightfall—
no one walks it
konomichi o yuku hito nashi ni aki no kure
The haiku describes the poet’s inner state—yet without the explanatory headnote, its words appear no less external than those of the previous poem. How then should it be understood?
To read a haiku is to become its co-author, to place yourself inside its words until they reveal one of the proteus-shapes of your own life. The resulting experience may well differ widely between readers: haiku’s image-based language invites an almost limitless freedom of interpretation. Written near the end of Bashō’s life, “this road” can be read as a poem painting the landscape of loneliness or as a poem looking toward an unnavigable death. It can also be read as direct and immediate self-portrait: the uninhabited autumn evening and empty road may themselves be the poet and what he feels. Understood in this last way, the haiku presents its author as a person outside any sense of the personal self. He has fallen into a world in which there is no walker, only path.
Paths mattered to Bashō, who could—like Wordsworth or John Muir—cover twenty or thirty miles a day by foot. In his youth, it seems he traveled only as circumstances required. In mid-life, he traveled by choice, following the example of earlier poet-wanderers he admired. By the end of his life, his journeying gives off the scent of an irrefusable restlessness, a simple incapacity to stay long at home. In the opening words of “Narrow Road to the Deep North,” a prose and haiku journal describing a trip of roughly 1500 miles undertaken by foot, boat, and horseback at the age of forty-five, Bashō wrote, “The moon and sun are travelers of a hundred generations. The years, coming and going, are wanderers too. Spending a lifetime adrift on boat decks, greeting old age while holding a horse by the mouth—for such a person, each day is a journey, and the journey itself becomes home.”
*
Bashō’s first home was Ueno, a castle town thirty miles southeast of Kyoto. Born there in 1644, and called Kinsaku as a boy, his samurai name was Matsuo Munefusa; he used at least two other pen names (Tōsei, “Green Peach,” was a good choice for a not-quite-ripened poet) before taking the name by which he’s now known. His father, Matsuo Yozaemon was a low-ranking samurai who earned his living by farming. He died in 1656, when Bashō was twelve.
Accounts of Bashō’s life differ widely in their details. Probably a second son with four sisters, Bashō left home to work in the household of the local samurai lord, and grew close to the samurai’s son, Tōdō Yoshitada, two years his elder. When Bashō was twenty, both young men had work chosen for publication in an anthology of local poets. (Printing technology had recently arrived in Japan, and such collections were the first truly popular books.) Each also contributed to a published linked-verse renga—a form of poetry written by more than one person, which Bashō would practice throughout his life.
The traditional form of Japanese poetry for a thousand years had been the five-line tanka (also called waka ), written in the syllable count of 5-7-5-7-7. The shorter haiku form emerged from two variations of that long-standing pattern. In one, a person would write the 5-7-5 syllable opening for a tanka and another then would “cap” it by writing the closing lines. (This was both a literary game and an adaptation of the “capping verses” of Zen, written to express and demonstrate
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