Matsuo Bashō
[In the following excerpt, Henderson examines twenty-seven haiku by Bashō, mostly from the poet's mature years. The critic maintains that these poems are characterized by an all-embracing love for humans and the mutable world, a concentration on the beauty of the Absolute, and simple images suggestive of deep meaning and unfathomable mysteries.]
Shortly after 1600 the chaos of civil war that had prevailed for centuries was brought to an end, and Tokugawa Iyeyasu established the shogunate that was to impose peace on Japan for two hundred and fifty years. In 1638, under the third shogun, a completely pacified Japan was officially isolated from the world, and in 1644 Matsuo Bashō was born.
Bashō would probably have been a poet in any age, but that in which he found himself was peculiarly favorable for the development and appreciation of his genius. Life for all was once more stable and secure; for the first time a rich and leisured bourgeoisie was being born; and samurai—men of the warrior class—who could no longer turn their energies to the arts of war, naturally turned them to the arts of peace. And of these arts poetry was one of the most popular.
At the age of eight Bashō, who was of samurai blood, was sent to the castle of his daimyo, the lord of Iga. There he became the page of the daimyo's son, Lord Sengin, a lad just a few years older than Bashō himself. For fourteen years the two lived in close companionship, with Sengin not so much Bashō's master as his friend and guide and older brother. From Sengin Bashō learned the art of poetry as it was then known, and together they studied the hokku of the day; especially the school of Teitoku, of course, and also that of Kigin. At the end of the fourteen years Lord Sengin suddenly died, and within two months Bashō had gone to the monastery at Koyasan and had ‘renounced the world.’
There can be no doubt that Bashō was utterly broken up at the death of his much-loved master, and that the impression it made influenced his entire life. Some twenty years later Bashō went back to Iga in the spring, and stood again under the cherry trees where he and Sengin had worked and played so long, and with a heart too full to make a normal poem all he could say was:
Oh, many, many things
Are brought to mind
By cherry-blossoms—
However, though Bashō had definitely given up ‘the world,’ this did not mean that he confined himself to a monastery, and we next hear of him at Kyoto studying haiku under Kigin. When Kigin went to Yedo (the present Tokyo) Bashō followed him; and two years later, when he was thirty, Bashō started a school of his own, taking as his first pupil a young boy who afterward became famous in his own right under the name of Kikaku.
Bashō took his poetry seriously, and soon made a name for himself as a haiku-master; but his work, though sincere, was not at first radically different from that of his contemporaries. Then, when he was about thirty-eight, something happened to him. He announced that his life, simple as it was, was ‘too worldly’; he invented a new form of haiku; and he began the serious study of Zen—the Buddhist sect which gives most attention to contemplation and to what may be called natural mysticism. It was after this, in the last ten years of his life, that nearly all of Bashō's great poetry was written.
Bashō's first poem in the new style was the famous:
On a leafless bough
A crow is sitting;—autumn,
Darkening now—
This differs from all previous haiku in that the mood is produced by a simple description. It is a plain statement of facts which make a picture. There is no expression of feeling, and, on the surface at least, no use of simile or metaphor.
In reading Bashō's later poems the important thing to remember is that he had an all-embracing love for human beings and the things of ‘this passing world,’ and that he was so imbued with the spirit of Zen that to him everything was an expression of ultimate Reality. The new spirit that Bashō put into haiku can in some ways be best illustrated by direct comparison with the earlier seventeen-syllable poems. Nearly every poet had at some time or other celebrated the cherry blossoms of Yoshino, and none more successfully than Teishitsu. … But when Bashō says:
Thin shanks! Even so,
While I have them:—blossom-covered
Hills of Yoshino!
he is saying something quite new. This is not merely: ‘How beautiful they are!’ As it is haiku, its full meaning cannot be put into words, and its connotations have to be felt rather than clearly thought out. Of course it is an expression of the everlasting human struggle for beauty, against odds; for the poem is impersonal in that Bashō is thinking of other strugglers as well as of himself. But behind it all is Bashō's eternal concentration on the beauty of the Absolute which makes the poem a deeper allegory still.
If this were the only poem that Bashō had ever written one might wonder whether the poet really put into it all the deep meaning that one finds. But the proof is overwhelming that, consciously or unconsciously, Bashō did put into his later haiku all the meaning that anyone can find, and probably much more. Some of them are direct records of semi-mystic experience. One day while he was journeying through Kiso, Bashō lost his way in a fog in the mountains. For what seemed like hours he felt his way along a narrow and dangerous path, at each step getting nearer and nearer to the sound of a rushing torrent far below him. Trembling, he turned a corner; the fog was blown away, and he was out in bright sunlight at the head of a little rustic bridge suspended over a deep gorge. Looking at the blue sky above, at the white water below, at the tangled grasses and the vine-wrapped trees that climbed the steep side of the cleft, he was carried out of himself completely. Not knowing which was sky or trees and which was Bashō, he found himself almost unconsciously exclaiming:
Around existence twine
(Oh, bridge that hangs across the gorge!)
Ropes of twisted vine.
This poem has all the meaning that anyone can find, though Bashō naturally had no time to think it all out consciously in detail. The association of ideas which connects the hanging bridge with the rest of the poem is mundane as well as metaphysical, for rustic suspension bridges of this type actually were made with ropes of twisted vines.
But even those poems that are apparently most trivial have underlying meaning. Take for example:
Oh, these spring days!
A nameless little mountain,
In the morning haze—
On the surface this is just a charming scene, and a tenderness for common, ordinary things. But a trained haiku-reader will see more; and we can see it too when we realize that this poem was written at Nara, which is surrounded by named mountains whose fame in Japan is second to that of Fuji only. And behind it all, though here possibly quite unconscious, is Bashō's eternal concentration on the beauties of the Absolute: ‘If even the beauties of this world can be suggested only by an indirect approach … !’
To Bashō haiku were means of expressing his deepest emotions, and there is a famous tale that illustrates what he felt about them. One day when he and his pupil, Kikaku, were going through the fields, looking at the darting dragonflies, Kikaku made a seventeen-syllable verse:
‘Red dragonflies!
Take off their wings,
And they are pepperpods!’
‘No!’ said Bashō, ‘that is not haiku. If you wish to make a haiku on the subject you must say:
‘Red pepperpods!
Add wings to them,
And they are dragonflies!’
Bashō's best-known work is Oku no Hosomichi, Distant Byways, a collection of notes of a six-months journey which started from Yedo in the spring of 1689, went through parts of northern Japan, and ended at the sacred shrine of the Sun-Goddess at Ise. It is quite short—it could be translated into English in about ten thousand words—and it contains only about fifty of Bashō's haiku. Yet it is undoubtedly one of the great works of Japanese literature, and it has probably been annotated and commented on more than any other work of its size in the world. Comment is unfortunately necessary as Bashō's style is almost like a shorthand, and he is constantly making allusions which were clear in his own day, but which are not clear now.
The book is absolutely unpretentious, and so are the haiku, which are an integral part of the text. Some are simple descriptions of a mood produced by the scenery, as:
Cool it is, and still:
Just the tip of a crescent moon
Over Black-wing Hill.
Others derive their chief interest from what they show of the personality of Bashō. For instance, one day at the beginning of May he came to a certain village. At that time, in preparation for the Boy's Festival of May 5th, every household with a boy in it would be flying, from the top of tall flagpoles, great paper streamers made to look like carp. Bashō does not say anything about this, as all Japanese would know it naturally, but among other things he tells how he went to the local temple and had tea there. He found that this temple preserved as its greatest treasures the sword of Yoshitsune, Japan's favorite hero, and the portable altar that used to be carried by the monk Benkei, the strong man who became Yoshitsune's most noted retainer. Bashō then inserts the haiku:
Altar of Benkei!
Yoshitsune's sword! … Oh, fly
The carp in May!
a poem whose meaning may seem a little obscure at first sight, but which, though not deep, is charming when it is thought out.
And then a little later he comes to the ruins of Takadate Castle, where Yoshitsune and his last faithful followers were killed. From this spot he could see the plains of Hiraizumi, the site of the golden temples of Chuzonji, and other famous places, at that time green fields or waste land, where in former ages many mighty warriors had lived in splendor. Bashō tells how he climbed up to the castle, thinking of by-gone glories, and he adds what is probably the most-discussed haiku in the language:
The summer grasses grow.
Of mighty warriors' splendid dreams
The afterglow.
This is a very inadequate translation. It lacks the martial roll of tsuwamonodomo ga, and ‘dreams’ does not suggest as well as yume does ‘splendor,’ ‘glorious deeds,’ and ‘lives that have passed like a dream.’ Most of all it lacks the crack of ato, a word that is almost untranslatable. Ato is literally ‘the afterwards’ and is usually translated as result, traces, footsteps, wake, relics, ruins, etc., depending on the context.
‘Summer grasses!
The afterwards of warriors' dreams!’
might be a better translation. (If only, like Humpty Dumpty, we could make words do more than their proper work for us!) But even this would tend to obscure the meaning of the poem, which is not only that summer grasses are now growing on the sites of former splendor, but also that the grasses bring to memory the dreams which like them grew and blossomed and died—and many other things besides. For a poem such as this there is nothing to do except refer the reader again to the original.
In haiku, when two ideas are balanced, they are to be compared from many angles. Sora, Bashō's pupil and fellow-traveler, indicates one of these angles in the companion verse that he composed on the same occasion:
In deutzia-flowers there
One seems to see old Kanefusa's
Snow-white hair …
But this of course is simply the application of part of Bashō's thought to a particular instance.
The great danger for the commentator is that of talking too much, so perhaps it would be as well to finish these extracts from Oku no Hosomichi by letting Bashō speak for himself. He is reporting a conversation with one of his friends with whom he is staying in the province of Oshu—the ‘Distant Country’:
My host asked first: ‘At the crossing of the Shirakawa Barrier, what poem did you compose?’
‘The troubles of the long journey had tired me in body and mind, and moreover, I was carried away by the scenery and the old-time feeling that it evoked, so that I was not in any condition to compose a poem at the moment. But thinking it a pity to pass in silence, I gave this one:
Here is refinement's start:
Songs at the planting of rice-fields,
In the country's farthest part.’
I gave him this for an answer, and we added a second and a third verse to it, and so made it into a renga (a linked verse).
Many pages of comment have been written about this poem, and many explanations of it have been given. One is that Bashō, coming as he did straight from the ultra-refinement of the capital, was struck with the fact that here was its basis, financial as well as historical. Another, that Bashō wished to point out the necessary connection between true refinement and natural simplicity. A third, and the most modern, is that Bashō was simply paying a compliment to Oshu. The poem means different things to different people, and the reader may take his choice.
On all his journeys Bashō naturally gravitated to the society of poets, and would often stop for days composing haiku and renga with them. It was seldom that he was, as here, at a loss for a poem on any subject, and there are naturally many stories of his readiness in composition. One of the best-known is his answer to a joking request to compose a haiku on the ‘Eight Views’ of Lake Biwa. It should be explained that these are all very famous in literature and art, and that one of the ‘views’ is ‘The Bell of Mii Temple,’ whose tone is considered surpassingly lovely. Also that the point of the joke was that there did exist a well-known tanka of thirty-one syllables in which, by a series of word-plays, all eight views actually are mentioned by name. Bashō naturally could not match this in seventeen syllables, even if he had been willing to stoop to such trickery, but he got out of the dilemma very prettily with:
Eight Views?—Ah, well,
Mist hid seven when I heard
Miidera's Bell!
Perhaps this poem is not a very profound one, though most of Bashō's haiku have more to them than meets the eye at first. But others show very clearly his eternal concentration on the Absolute. Of course we must reconstruct for ourselves the circumstances in which they were written, and we can imagine Bashō and his fellow-travelers coming out to start their morning journey—possibly after an evening spent in discussion of Nirvana and the quest of Reality which each man has to take alone—when Bashō turns to them and says:
Morning-glories!—See!
———And these also are not
Companions for me!
—a poem strangely reminiscent of what has been called the most poignant Indian expression of the sense of the eternal movement and unsubstantiality of life, Santi Deva's: ‘Who is a kinsman, and who a friend, and unto whom?’
Bashō usually traveled with at least one pupil or companion—someone who would understand when he tried to put an indefinable emotion into words. Thus when he came to the ‘Hagi’ Tamagawa (one of the six ‘Jewel Rivers’ in Japan) and saw the hagi there (a sort of bush clover with gracefully drooping branches) swaying in the wind, he could be sure of having his feeling apprehended when he said:
Hagi does not spill
The small white dewdrops, though its waves
Are never still …
For foreigners who are beginning haiku, it may be necessary to say that though this poem is, on the surface, simply a description of hagi, its connotations cannot be appreciated without realizing that whenever dewdrops are mentioned most cultured Japanese immediately associate them with fleeting human lives.
In any outline of Bashō's poems it is impossible to leave out of consideration the most famous haiku of all—the haiku that Bashō himself considered the standard for his new style:
An ancient pond;
Plash of the water
When a frog jumps in.
Many competent critics have found in this a deep and esoteric meaning; others have considered it too darkly mysterious to understand at all. Perhaps some light may be thrown by the fact that the last twelve syllables were the first to be composed and the first five were added only after a discussion in which several alternatives had been proposed. If a foreigner may venture an opinion on such high matters it would be that Bashō had experienced and wished to record a sense of peace and quiet and complete serenity. Certainly, ‘plash of the water when a frog jumps in’ does give this feeling directly, for there must have been external quiet for the sound to have been heard, and internal quiet for it to have been noticed strongly enough to make Bashō compose a poem about it.
Whether or not this is the proper reading of the ‘old pond’ poem, at least it is certain that in many of his later haiku Bashō does record a strong emotion by the simple description of an apparently unimportant fact. Thus for example:
Why, as it fell
Water that was in it spilled.
Camellia bell!
is on the surface just the description of a camellia-bloom which does fall all at once instead of piecemeal. Though it may seem thin at first sight, the effect is much like that of the plash of water in the old pond; and it should also be noted that this poem is a favorite among the Japanese.
In 1694 Bashō died, and died as he would have wished, on one of his beloved wanderings, and surrounded by many of his friends and pupils. During his illness he was constantly discussing religion and philosophy and poetry (three things that were almost one to Bashō), and when it became evident that he was dying, his friends asked him to give them his death-poem—the sum of his philosophy. Bashō refused, on the ground that every poem in his last eight years, starting with the ‘old pond’ haiku, had been composed as if it were a death-poem. But on the next morning he called them to his bedside, saying that during the night he had dreamed, and that on waking a poem had come to him. And he gave them:
On a journey, ill—
And my dreams on withered fields
Are wandering still.
Surely as lovely a farewell as any poet ever gave to the world.
A few more translations are added without comment. But it might be well to remind the beginner in haiku that though all these poems have more to them than is on the surface, few if any of them should be read as allegories in the ordinary sense, and all of them are primarily pictures. Abbé Dimnet1 suggests that we should all make notes of those experiences which we would like to remember. These notes, he says, should be ‘brief enough to preclude the danger of what the Veda calls “putting words between the truth and ourselves,”’ and at the same time ‘full enough to be clear to future, i.e. almost alien, re-reading.’ If we consider Bashō's later haiku as notes of this kind in poetic form, we shall not go far wrong in our appreciation of them.
“IN ISUMO CLIFF”
How rough the sea!
And, stretching off to Sado Isle,
The Galaxy. …
“ON THE HEIGHTS”
Here on the mountain-pass
Somehow they draw one's heart so—
Violets in the grass!
“DUSK”
A village where they ring
No bells!—Oh, what do they
do
At dusk in spring?
“PERSISTENCE”
So! And did it yell
Till it became all voice?
Cicada-shell!
“THEY ALSO”
The usually hateful crows!
They also, … on a morning
When it snows …
“THE END”
Leaning on their staves,
All the household, white-haired—
Visiting the graves!
“AN INVITATION”
Why not come and see
Loneliness! … One leaflet
From the kiri-tree …
“A REMEMBRANCE”
Snow that we two
Looked at together—this year
Is it fallen anew?
“TRANSIENT BEAUTY”
Ah! First snow!
Enough to make narcissus-leaves
Bend low!
“INTO THE DARKNESS”
Falling of the night
Upon the sea, and wild ducks' voices
Shadowy, and white …
Herewith ends this brief introduction to haiku, and I can only hope that the interest and beauty of these little poems have not been wholly lost in the process of giving them an English uniform.
The haiku-form is peculiarly Japanese, but I believe most strongly that it has characteristics which transcend the barriers of language and of nationality, and which fit it for a special place among the forms of Occidental poetry. What the final English haiku-form will be, I do not know. It may be two lines, or three, or four; it may be rimed or unrimed. But I am sure that whatever it is, it will be a definite form, for a haiku is a poem and not a dribble of prose.
Note
-
In ‘The Art of Thinking,’ by Ernest Dimnet. Simon & Schuster, N.Y. 1929.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.