The only substantial collection in English of Basho's renku, tanka, letters and spoken word along with his haiku, travel journals, and essays.
The only poet in old-time literature who paid attention with praise to ordinary women, children, and teenagers in hundreds of poems
Hundreds upon hundreds of Basho works (mostly renku)about women, children, teenagers, friendship, compassion, love.
These are resources we can use to better understand ourselves and humanity.
Interesting and heartfelt (not scholarly and boring) for anyone concerned with humanity.
“An astonishing range of social subject matter and compassionate intuition”
"The primordial power of the feminine emanating from Basho's poetry"
Hopeful, life-affirming messages from one of the greatest minds ever.
Through his letters, we travel through his mind and discover Basho's gentleness and humanity.
I plead for your help in finding a person or group to take over my 3000 pages of Basho material, to edit and improve the material, to receive 100% of royalties, to spread Basho’s wisdom worldwide and preserve for future generations.
Quotations from Basho Prose
The days and months are guests passing through eternity. The years that go by also are travelers.
The mountains in silence nurture the spirit; the water with movement calms the emotions.
All the more joyful, all the more caring
Seek not the traces of the ancients; seek rather the places they sought.
Basho Spoken Word
Only this, apply your heart to what children do
"The attachment to Oldness is the very worst disease a poet can have."
“The skillful have a disease; let a three-foot child get the poem"
"Be sick and tired of yesterday’s self."
"This is the path of a fresh lively taste with aliveness in both heart and words." .
"In poetry is a realm which cannot be taught. You must pass through it yourself. Some poets have made no effort to pass through, merely counting things and trying to remember them. There was no passing through the things."
"In verses of other poets, there is too much making and the heart’s immediacy is lost. What is made from the heart is good; the product of words shall not be preferred."
"We can live without poetry, yet without harmonizing with the world’s feeling and passing not through human feeling, a person cannot be fulfilled. Also, without good friends, this would be difficult."
"Poetry benefits from the realization of ordinary words."
"Many of my followers write haiku equal to mine, however in renku is the bone marrow of this old man."
"Your following stanza should suit the previous one as an expression of the same heart's connection."
"Link verses the way children play."
"Make renku ride the Energy. Get the timing wrong, you ruin the rhythm."
"The physical form first of all must be graceful then a musical quality makes a superior verse."
"As the years passed by to half a century. asleep I hovered among morning clouds and evening dusk, awake I was astonished at the voices of mountain streams and wild birds."
“These flies sure enjoy having an unexpected sick person.”
Haiku of Humanity
Drunk on sake woman wearing haori puts in a sword
Night in spring one hidden in mystery temple corner
Wrapping rice cake with one hands she tucks hair behind ear
On Life's journey plowing a small field going and returning
Child of poverty hulling rice, pauses to look at the moon
Tone so clear the Big Dipper resounds her mallet
Huddling under the futon, cold horrible night
Jar cracks with the ice at night awakening
Basho Renku Masterpieces
With her needle in autumn she manages to make ends meet Daughter playing koto reaches age seven
After the years of grieving. . . finally past eighteen Day and night dreams of Father in that battle
Now to this brothel my body has been sold Can I trust you with a letter I wrote, mirror polisher?
Only my face by rice-seedling mud is not soiled Breastfeeding on my lap what dreams do you see?
Single renku stanzas
Giving birth to love in the world, she adorns herself
Autumn wind saying not a word child in tears
Among women one allowed to lead them in chorus
Easing in her slender forearm for his pillow
Two death poems:
On a journey taken ill dreams on withered fields wander about
Clear cascade - into the ripples fall green pine needles
Two legends about women told by Hearn in his collection of supernatural tales Kwaidan may relate to particular Basho verses. The Legend of Uba-zakura, the Wet-Nurse’s Cherry Tree,’ which is older than Basho, originated in Matsuyama on the island of Shikoku; Basho’s mother came from this province, so it is possible she told it to him when he was a child, a tale from the faraway place where mama lived when she was a child.
The Legend of the Wet-Nurse’s Cherry Tree
An old childless couple appealed to the gods at the local temple, Tosai-ji (a short walk from Matsuyamtation) and were blessed with a daughter. An uba breastfeed the infant, and after weaning, was her attendant. The girl grew up in beauty until at age 15 she became fatally ill. The uba went to the temple and beseeched the gods, “spare the child, take me instead”. The gods accepted, the girl got better and the old woman faded. Before she died she told the parents of her bargain with the gods and asked them to fulfill the promise she made to plant a cherry tree in the temple garden in gratitude for the child’s life. They did, and the tree prospered for 254 years. Each Spring, on the anniversary of the uba’s death, the tree came into glorious full bloom. Hearn says “The flowers were always pink and white like the breasts of a woman full of milk.”
We notice how feminine-positive the legend is. The little girl is loved and cherished, the uba a paragon of kindness and altruism. We also notice how physical is Hearn's perception: how he focuses on the colors of milk and nipples, so every year when cherries are in bloom, I look at the blossoms and consider whether they look like breast milk and a pink nipple.
In 1664, when he was just 19, Basho wrote his third recorded haiku:
Cherry blossoms of the uba — in old age her memories
The standard interpretation of this haiku posits that uba zakura ("wet nurse cherry tree") is one species of cherry tree, and the verse concerns an old man recalling his glorious youth. Another interpretation takes it to mean “a faded beauty,” an old woman who recalls her days (and nights) or youthful elegance under cherry blossoms. The interpretation here, in accord with the legend, takes the uba in uba-zakura to actually be a wet-nurse. The memories may be of the babe at her breast, the child playing merrily, the teenager getting sick, the prayer to the gods that saved her life. Or Basho may be ‘sketching’ his family’s uba with baby Basho – or maybe his little sister Oyoshi, a baby nursing when seven year old Basho first became aware of the world. Or it can be a sketch of any woman who can remember breastfeeding. All these feminine memories are seen and felt in the gorgeous cherry blossoms filling the tree with pink and white, like the milky nipples long ago.
In another collection, Kokoro, Hearn tells the story of a Japanese baby whose mother died from cholera just after she gave birth; before she passed she requested her husband to keep the baby close to her ihai, a small portable memorial tablet, every day for three years. He did so, and while he had no money to properly feed the baby, Hearn notes the child was strong and healthy. The idea is that even through she was dead, the mother, through her ihai, did breastfeed her child. Hearn notes that all Japanese carry about the belief that the dead are still with them, helping and advising them. Here is a renku in which Basho explores breastfeeding, and we see how ideas from Lafcadio Hearn add to our appreciation of Basho's thought.
No longer black
I scratch my scalp with
hardwood plectrum
Breastfeeding on my lap
what dreams do you see?
We imagine the story as though Hearn was telling it. This woman has both grey hair and an infant at her breast, so she may be a grandmother who, after her daughter died, saves the life of her grandchild. (A woman who has breastfed before may be able to “induce lactation” and breastfed again, without having a baby or getting pregnant, even after menopause. Anthropologist Sarah Hrdy explains: “In allomothers able to produce milk, there is no colostrum, but otherwise the composition of induced milk is adequate to sustain infant growth.”) The plectrum is for plucking the strings of a shamisen or lute. “She scratches her scalp” in difficulty understanding or accepting her fate: the death of her daughter, the three needs conflicting within her: to nurture the infant, to continue her adult life, and to rest her aging body. The ever-present conflict of these needs drives her to distraction –and so she absent-mindedly uses her tool for plucking strings to scratch an itch under her hair.
Knowing nothing of grandmother’s sorrow, the child delights in the softness of her body and flavor of her milk. From Hearn, we form the idea that the dead mother is, in fact, feeding her infant through her mother's breasts. The old woman looks into baby’s eyes and forehead searching to see the dreams within. Unlike her own dreams gone sour, these dreams are fresh and new – and she wonders whether her grandchild will overcome the hardship of losing mother to realize those dreams, or whether the mother is nourishing and supporting her child from the other world..
We finish this section with a suitable single stanza of Basho renku:
Kite string cut -- soul of the milk-giver soars to heaven
The vivid physical image of a kit string cut, a bond being broken, the kite floating off to the vastness of space, flows into the spiritual image of the nurse parting from the living earth.
The Legend of Green Willow
A samurai on a journey overtaken by storm and night, takes shelter in a cottage. Here live an old couple and a maiden named Green Willow as graceful as a sapling. They fall in love and marry to live happily for five years -- until suddenly one day Green Willow cries out in pain, saying she will now die. Someone has taken an axe to the willow tree which is her heart, its sap her life blood.
Her whole form appeared to collapse in the strangest way, and to sink down, down -- level with the floor. Tomotada sprang to support her, but there was nothing to support! There lay on the matting only the empty robes of the fair creature and the ornaments that she had worn in her hair: the body had ceased to exist
Tomotada shaved his head to wander about offering prayers for her salvation. Returning to the cottage, he found three willows stumps remaining, two old and gnarled, and a sapling cut down long ago.
Green Willow reaching to the mud of low tide
Scholars say a willow tree on the riverbank has some of her branches ending underwater, but now at low tide, these reach down to mud. If the verse is merely a “nature verse,” this interpretation may be sufficient – however perhaps we can find a more interesting interpretation along a personal, feminine path. Willows in Japan are always associated with the young female. If we allow “Green Willow” to be the young woman in the legend, we can spend some time with her slender graceful youthful form at low tide reaching down for a shell stranded in the mud, a shell containing a creature full of protein, minerals, and omega 3 fatty acids. If we search for humanity in Basho’s works, we find it.
We can also meet the human Green Willow in this linked verse:
Green willow her hips and hair like willows
Wretched waiting wind through the pines also is yearning
Both hips and hair, as slender and flexible as willow branches covered with young green leaves swaying sensually in the wind; a most gorgeous female image. Basho, now 22 years old, chooses to have this young willowy woman waiting for a lover who may never show.Notice the contrast between willow beauty and unfulfilled desire so intense it overflows self to fill the wind with longing.
I plead for your help in finding a person or group to take over my 3000 pages of Basho material, to edit and improve the presentation, to receive all royalties from sales, to spread Basho’s wisdom worldwide and preserve for future generations.
The only substantial collection in English of Basho's renku, tanka, letters and spoken word along with his haiku, travel journals, and essays.
The only poet in old-time literature who paid attention with praise to ordinary women, children, and teenagers in hundreds of poems
Hundreds upon hundreds of Basho works (mostly renku)about women, children, teenagers, friendship, compassion, love.
These are resources we can use to better understand ourselves and humanity.
Interesting and heartfelt (not scholarly and boring) for anyone concerned with humanity.
“An astonishing range of social subject matter and compassionate intuition”
"The primordial power of the feminine emanating from Basho's poetry"
Hopeful, life-affirming messages from one of the greatest minds ever.
Through his letters, we travel through his mind and discover Basho's gentleness and humanity.
I plead for your help in finding a person or group to take over my 3000 pages of Basho material, to edit and improve the material, to receive 100% of royalties, to spread Basho’s wisdom worldwide and preserve for future generations.
Quotations from Basho Prose
The days and months are guests passing through eternity. The years that go by also are travelers.
The mountains in silence nurture the spirit; the water with movement calms the emotions.
All the more joyful, all the more caring
Seek not the traces of the ancients; seek rather the places they sought.
Basho Spoken Word
Only this, apply your heart to what children do
"The attachment to Oldness is the very worst disease a poet can have."
“The skillful have a disease; let a three-foot child get the poem"
"Be sick and tired of yesterday’s self."
"This is the path of a fresh lively taste with aliveness in both heart and words." .
"In poetry is a realm which cannot be taught. You must pass through it yourself. Some poets have made no effort to pass through, merely counting things and trying to remember them. There was no passing through the things."
"In verses of other poets, there is too much making and the heart’s immediacy is lost. What is made from the heart is good; the product of words shall not be preferred."
"We can live without poetry, yet without harmonizing with the world’s feeling and passing not through human feeling, a person cannot be fulfilled. Also, without good friends, this would be difficult."
"Poetry benefits from the realization of ordinary words."
"Many of my followers write haiku equal to mine, however in renku is the bone marrow of this old man."
"Your following stanza should suit the previous one as an expression of the same heart's connection."
"Link verses the way children play."
"Make renku ride the Energy. Get the timing wrong, you ruin the rhythm."
"The physical form first of all must be graceful then a musical quality makes a superior verse."
"As the years passed by to half a century. asleep I hovered among morning clouds and evening dusk, awake I was astonished at the voices of mountain streams and wild birds."
“These flies sure enjoy having an unexpected sick person.”
Haiku of Humanity
Drunk on sake woman wearing haori puts in a sword
Night in spring one hidden in mystery temple corner
Wrapping rice cake with one hands she tucks hair behind ear
On Life's journey plowing a small field going and returning
Child of poverty hulling rice, pauses to look at the moon
Tone so clear the Big Dipper resounds her mallet
Huddling under the futon, cold horrible night
Jar cracks with the ice at night awakening
Basho Renku Masterpieces
With her needle in autumn she manages to make ends meet Daughter playing koto reaches age seven
After the years of grieving. . . finally past eighteen Day and night dreams of Father in that battle
Now to this brothel my body has been sold Can I trust you with a letter I wrote, mirror polisher?
Only my face by rice-seedling mud is not soiled Breastfeeding on my lap what dreams do you see?
Single renku stanzas
Giving birth to love in the world, she adorns herself
Autumn wind saying not a word child in tears
Among women one allowed to lead them in chorus
Easing in her slender forearm for his pillow
Two death poems:
On a journey taken ill dreams on withered fields wander about
Clear cascade - into the ripples fall green pine needles