The Heart of Haiku Read Online Free

markers for the fruition of Bashō’s efforts. The inner boundary-marker can be found in a haiku often referred to as Bashō’s first mature work:

    On a leafless branch,
    a crow’s settling:
    autumn nightfall
    kareedani  karasu no tomarikeri aki no kure
     
    When autumn’s diminishments and an ordinary crow are felt to be beauty as much as loss, loss is unpinned. In Japanese, the alloy of beauty and sadness found in this poem is described as sabi —a quality at the heart of much of Bashō’s mature writing. The noun sabishi is generally translated as “loneliness,” or sometimes “solitude,” but the word originates in associations very close to those found in this haiku: it holds the feeling of whatever is chill, withered, and pared down to the leanness of essence. “The works of other schools of  poetry are like colored paintings; my disciples paint with black ink,” Basho later said. To feel sabi is to feel keenly one’s own sharp and particular existence amid its own impermanence, and to value the singular moment as William Blake did “infinity in the palm of your hand”—to feel it precise and almost-weightless as a sand grain, yet also vast.  In making the expression of sabi one of haiku’s goals, Bashō turned his own and his students’ writing toward a new spirit. The gravitational pull of that renewed seriousness shifted haiku-writing from the construction of entertainment to the making of art.
    Haiku’s imagery is not confined to the lyrical, as we’ve already seen. “Eat vegetable soup, not duck stew,” Bashō famously told his students, calling plainness and oddity the bones of haiku. Another poem from this time begins with a headnote:
    “The rich enjoy the finest meats and ambitious young men save money by eating root vegetables. I myself am simply poor.”

    snowy morning—      
    alone,
    still able to chew dried salmon
    yuki no ashita hitori karazake wo kami etari  

    In 17th-century Japan, karazake was commoner’s food. For Bashō, to speak of eating dried salmon on a cold morning was neither complaint nor self-pity—it was an evocation of wabi . An idea often linked to sabi, and equally important to Bashō’s work, wabi conveys the beauty of the most ordinary circumstances and objects. A hemp farmer’s jacket, a plain fired-clay cup, the steam rising from a boiling teapot— these are wabi’s essence. A gold-and-cloisonné bowl or ornate silk clothes are its opposite. In the spirit of wabi , then, this poem mulls the deep satisfaction of a life stripped almost bare.
    Of the two transition-markers that signal Bashō’s maturation as person and poet, the inward change was his embodiment of a Zen spirit , wabi-sabi , and plainness. The outer change was the alteration of circumstance that led to the name by which he’s now known. In feudal-era Japan, “town teachers,” as they were called, lived by the support of students and wealthy patrons. Such gifts might be monetary, but as often took the form of rice, books, sandals, and clothes. For nine years in Edo, Bashō had lived in rented housing, on a combination of salary from his water-company work, fees for correcting poems, and teaching donations. In the winter of 1680, shortly after Bashō wrote his haiku on the autumn crow, one of his followers built him a simple thatch-roofed hut on the bank of the Sumida River in Fukugawa, a quiet outskirt of the city. That spring, another student planted a kind of Japanese plantain or banana tree in its front garden—a plant known in Japanese as a bashō . The house came to be called the Bashō Hut, and its inhabitant soon took the name as well.
    Many years later, when living in a different hut near the site of his first one, Bashō wrote two different versions of a haibun on the occasion of transplanting some shoots from his old bashō tree to a new location in his garden. Here is an excerpt, ending with its haiku:

    What year did I come to nest in this area, planting a single