Student Question

What does the imagery in Yosa Buson's poem suggest about life?

I go, you stay; /
two autumns. /

His loneliness the Abbot is shitting /
In the withered fields /

He’s on the porch scaping his wife and kids- /
how hot is it! /

Cover my head or my feet? /
The winter quilt. /

A tethered horse, /
snow /
In both stirrups. /

Expert Answers

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This appears to be a cobbling together of haikus by the Japanese poet Buson. All the imagery—descriptions which use any of the five senses of sight, sound, taste, touch, or smell—conveys a sense of loss or loneliness, of a person having to face a life with limits. Images featuring intense temperatures express discomfort.

In the first haiku, the imagery of two people going their separate ways and thus experiencing "two autumns," communicates loneliness. Neither person will have the other to share their autumn with. Neither will see the same leaves or the same trees.

The second haiku, which most translate his "Holiness the abbot" also conveys the loneliness of being by oneself in a "withered field" that offers little pleasure or sustenance. That experience is bleak and cold, as the abbot, "shitting" among dry, dead plant life will have little protection from the elements. In the third haiku, loneliness and alienation are conveyed in the imagery of the man on the "hot" porch, all alone, trying to avoid his family even if it makes him physically uncomfortable; the heat suggests anger.

In the fourth haiku, the imagery suggests scarcity; the speaker has a winter quilt, but it is not large enough to provide him full protection in winter, and he has to choose between covering his head or his feet. In the final haiku, we can feel the cold of the "tethered horse," who has been out long enough for his stirrups to be collecting "snow" as he stands alone and awaits his master's return.

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