Matsuo Bashō

Start Free Trial

Bashō

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

SOURCE: “Bashō,” in Haiku, Hokuseido, 1951, pp. 328-36.

[In the following excerpt, Blyth maintains that Bashō sought to convey in his poetry the greatness of ordinary life, as it honors the mind and body and the particularities of the fleeting world. This essay originally contained ideographic characters, which have been silently removed for this reprinting.]

There are three great names in the history of haiku, Bashô, Buson and Issa; we may include a fourth, Shiki. Bashô is the religious man, Buson the artist, Issa the humanist. Bashô is concerned with God as he sees himself in the mind of the poet before flowers and fields. Buson deals with things as they exist by and for themselves, in their own right. Issa is concerned with man, man the weak angel; with birds and beasts as they struggle like us to make a living and keep their heads above water. If we do not begin with Bashô, our interpretation of haiku is bound to lack depth. The objectivity of Buson and the subjectivity of Issa both spring from the homely little man with long eyebrows and a bad digestion.

It is truer in Japanese poetry than in any other, that for the understanding of it we need to understand the poet. Itô Jinsai1 said,

Where the teacher is, there is truth; respect for the teacher is respect for truth.

When therefore we come to Bashô, we do so because he is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Apart from human beings, there is no Buddha. Nevertheless, there is to be no imitation of Christ or any other person, no imitation of any teacher. In Bashô's own words,

Do not follow in the footsteps of the Ancients; seek what they sought.

As with Wordsworth, piety was the foundation of both Bashô's character and of his literary work. To him more than to any other oriental poet do Gensei's2 words apply;

By making faithfulness and filial piety the fundamental, and giving literary work a secondary place, poetry is profound.

We may compare what Wordsworth says:

To be incapable of a feeling of poetry, in my sense of the word, is to be without love of human nature and reverence for God.

Bashô felt that life was not deep enough, not continuous enough, and he wanted to give every action, every moment the value that it potentially had. He wanted the little life we lead to be at the same time the greater life. Every flower was to be the spring, every pain a birth pang, every man a haiku poet, walking in the Way of Haiku.

It was the life of the little day, the life of little people. And the man who had died said to himself, “Unless we encompass it in the greater day, and set the little life in the circle of the greater life, all is disaster.”3

What is this greater life, and how is the little life to be related to it? Or, to put the question in a more prosaic but more pertinent form, what is the social value of haiku? When we compare the life of Bashô especially, or of any other great haiku poet, with those of Wordsworth, Milton, Shelley, Keats, and so on, we are struck by one fact of seemingly little importance, that the Japanese haiku poets all had disciples; the English poets none. This is a matter of the greatest significance, for it is just here, in this religious attitude, that the little, prosaic life of little people may be set in the greater, the poetic life.

                    Winter seclusion:
Once again I will lean against
                    This post.

Bashô

Here, and here only, is the little life set in the circle of the greater, the ordinary in the extraordinary, the commonplace in the miraculous, the material in the spiritual, the human in the divine. To sit on the floor and lean one's back against a post may not seen the acme of comfort, but this is the pleasure Bashô is promising himself. During the winter, while the snow is silently falling, he will lean against the post as he did last year, reading and writing poetry, thinking

Thoughts that wander through eternity,

through our eternity, through the greater life. This post, rubbed smooth with countless vigils, black where his head rested against it, is all he asks for.

The Way of Haiku requires not only a Franciscan poverty, but this concentration of all the energies of mind and body, a perpetual sinking of oneself into things. Bashô tells us, and it is to be noted, we believe him:

                    The autumn full moon:
All night long
                    I paced round the lake.

All night gazing at the moon, and only this poor verse to show for it? But it must be remembered that Bashô was a teacher. And thus we too, when we look at the moon, look at it with the eyes of Bashô, those eyes that gazed at that moon and its reflection in the placid water of the lake. Buson says,

                    Spreading a straw mat in the field,
I sat and gazed
                    At the plum blossoms.

This sitting and looking at a flowering tree is not quite so simple and easy as it appears. Buson, besides being a poet, was an artist, and was expressing in silence and motionlessness the poetic and artistic meaning of this plum tree (for this is the meaning of “gazing”).

One of Bashô's haiku which illustrates both this plain severity of life and his tender affection for his pupils is the following:

                    The beginning of spring:
For the new year,
                    Five shô of rice from last year.

At Fukagawa, Bashô's disciples, especially Sampu, brought him all the necessities of life. He had in the house a large gourd which would hold five shô (1 shô=3.18 pints=1,8 litres), The happiness of the New Year is the remembrance of the fidelity and affection of his pupils, symbolized in the rice remaining over from the year before. A similar verse is:

“PUTTING ON A SILK GARMENT THAT RANSETSU GAVE ME FOR THE NEW YEAR”

                    The first morning of spring.
I feel like
                    Someone else.

Literally, “Whom do I look like?” Bashô's lack of affectation is shown also in the following:

“ANSWERING KIKAKU'S POEM ABOUT TADE (SMARTWEED) AND THE FIREFLY”

                    I am one
Who eats his breakfast,
                    Gazing at the morning-glories.

This was Bashô's reply to:

                    A firefly;
I partake of the smart-weed,
                    In my hermitage.

Kikaku

Kikaku means that, like the firefly, he prefers the night, and has eccentric tastes, enjoying the bitter flavour of the smartweed that other people dislike. Bashô says that the true poetic life is not here, but in eating one's rice and pickles for breakfast and gazing at whatever nature and the seasons bring us.

It would be just as hard to think of Bashô living in affluence or as even moderately well-off, as it would to imagine St. Francis a rich man. Bashô lived a life very similar to that of Meg Merrilies:

No breakfast had she many a morn,
                    No dinner had she many a noon,
And 'stead of supper she would stare
                    Full hard against the moon.

Chora gives us a picture of Bashô,—how different from that of the average European poet:

                    In travelling attire,
A stork in late autumn rain:
                    The old master Bashô.

The first poem in the Nozarashi Diary shows us Bashô's idea of the normal state of the poet, little different from that of the ascetic. The end proposed is not different from that ideal which Keats held up before himself, but the means are poles apart:

                    Resigned to death by exposure,
How the wind
                    Cuts through me!

Prepared to die by the roadside, he sets out on his journey. Why did he not stop at home, if not in comfort, at least out of the wind and rain? For several reasons. Without contact with things, with cold and hunger, real poetry is impossible. Further, Bashô was a missionary spirit and knew that all over Japan were people capable of treading the Way of Haiku. But beyond this, just as with Christ, Bashô's heart was turned towards poverty and simplicity; it was his fate, his lot, his destiny as a poet.

                    The year-end fair:
I would like to go out and buy
                    Some incense-sticks.

The modesty of Bashô's desires is evident in this verse. Nothing could be cheaper, or more cheerless, by ordinary standards.

Bashô's sympathy with animate things did not arise from any theory of the unity of life, nor from an innate love of living things. It was strictly poetic, and for this reason we find it partial and limited, but sincere. It springs, as is seen in the individual cases where it is expressed, from a deep experience of a particular case. Bashô was once returning from Ise, the home of the gods, to his native place of sad memories. Passing through the lonely forest, the cold rain pattering on the fallen leaves, he saw a small monkey sitting huddled on a bough, with that submissive pathos which human beings can hardly attain to. Animals alone possess it. He said:

                    First winter rain:
The monkey also seems
                    To want a small straw cloak.

He was preserved from any sentimentality about animals by the fact that his own life was full of discomfort, which he saw as inevitable, and, in a sense, desirable.

The gentleness of Bashô, (who was a samurai by birth) is a very special quality. We may perhaps compare him to Chaucer, of whom Thoreau says:

We are tempted to say that his genius was feminine, not masculine. It was such a feminineness, however, as is rarest to find in woman, though not the appreciation of it; perhaps it is not to be found at all in woman, but is only the feminine in man.

Bashô was not a great poetical genius by birth. During the first forty years of his life he wrote no verse that could be called remarkable, or even good. Unlike his contemporary Onitsura, who was mature at twenty five, Bashô made his way into the deepest realm of poetry by sheer effort and study, study here meaning not mere learning, but a concentration on the spiritual meaning of the culture he had inherited in haikai. Indeed, we may say that few men have been so really cultured as Bashô was, with his understanding of Confucianism, Taoism, Chinese Poetry, Waka, Buddhism, Zen, Painting, the Art of Tea. In Oi no Kobumi, he writes:

Saigyô's waka, Sôgi's renga, Sesshu's painting, Rikyu's Tea,—the spirit animating them is one.

Under Kigin, 1623-1705, Bashô probably studied the Manyôshu, the Kokinshu, the Shin Kokinshu, the Genjimonogatari, the Tosa Diary, the Tsurezuregusa and Saigyô's waka in his Sankashu. Other haiku poets also studied Saigyô, e.g. the verse of Sôin, written on a picture of Saigyô:

                    This Hôshi's appearance,
In the evening,
                    Is that of autumn.

There are a great number of haiku concerning Saigyô, and not a few of Bashô's referring to or based on Saigyô's waka. Bashô's interest in these was due to their apparent objectivity but real subjectivity, their yugen, their painful feeling, artistry, purity. More than the Chinese poets, he admired Saigyô for his life of poverty and wandering, his deep fusion of poetry and religion.

With truly Japanese genius, he did not merely read and repeat the words and phrases of these men, but put their spirit into practice in his daily life. There is a far-off but deep resemblance here between Bashô and Johnson, two utterly different types of men, who yet both hold a position in the history of literature higher than their actual writings warrant, by virtue of their personal character.

When all is written that can be written, and all is done that can be done, it may be found that Bashô was not only the greatest of all the Japanese, but that he is to be numbered among those few human beings who lived, and taught us how to live by living.

Notes

  1. 1627-1705, Confucianist scholar.

  2. 1623-96; priest and waka poet.

  3. Lawrence, The Man Who Died.

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.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

Matsuo Bashō

Next

Bashō

Loading...