Poetry Chaikhana Blog

It is deep autumn
by Matsuo Basho

English version by R. H. Blyth

It is deep autumn
My neighbor
How does he live, I wonder.

/ Image by Anthony Ievlev /

Some haiku can put us into a dream state, painting in the inner eye a whole landscape, bringing us deeply into an expansive moment in time. And Basho is one of the greatest masters of the art form. Yet, this particular haiku doesn’t touch me that way. It is simple, pared down to almost nothing. There is no artistic evocation of the natural world, other than the observation that it is autumn. And then a question about his neighbor. My first reaction is to be disappointed by the haiku. And then I sit with it and I find so much more welling up within me as I let it percolate in my mind.

The mere mention of “deep autumn” infuses me with the tentative melancholy of the season. Looking outside my window on this chilly autumn morning in Oregon, I see trees with bright yellows and reds beneath a gray sky, and I know how quickly this lovely scene will pass. It makes the beauty all the more magical somehow. It’s as if the life I took for granted throughout the spring and summer is leaving this world and journeying to the otherworld, and I have caught sight of its departure.

But Basho immediately wonders about his neighbor, how he lives. Why?

I imagine it is because autumn is the time when abundance shifts to meager portions. When the world is full of ripeness, we assume all are doing well. But when branches are bare the heart, when it is not shut down, asks how does my neighbor provide his next meal? How does he keep his house warm?

Perhaps this poem is an observation that autumn is a time for empathy, for compassion, as we appreciate the fragile beauty of the world.

Recommended Books: Matsuo Basho

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Matsuo Basho Japan (1644 – 1694) Timeline Buddhist : Zen / Chan

Matsuo Bashō is the poet who gave haiku its soul. Before him, haikai verse was mostly a parlor game of wordplay and clever allusion. In his hands, those seventeen syllables became a way of seeing, a way of standing so quietly in the present moment that a frog, a crow, or the sound of water could open into the whole of existence.

He was born in 1644 in Iga Province, into a family of low samurai rank. As a young man he entered the service of Tōdō Yoshitada, a young lord just a couple of years older than he was, who loved poetry. The two wrote verse together, and it seems to have been a real friendship. When Yoshitada died suddenly in 1666, Bashō’s place in that world went with him. He left service, and for several years we lose track of him. Later in life he admitted that he had once wanted an official post and a secure place in society. That door had closed.

Around 1672 he went to Edo and slowly made a name for himself as a haikai master, with students and a following. Then, in 1680, he did something unexpected: he walked away from the city’s literary scene and moved into a simple hut across the river in Fukagawa. A student planted a banana tree (bashō) beside it. Its big, ragged leaves tore easily in the wind, and he loved it. The hut came to be called the Bashō-an, and the poet took his name from it.

These were years of inner searching. He studied Zen with a priest named Butchō, who was staying nearby, and sat in meditation. In the winter of 1682 a fire swept through the neighborhood and burned his hut. The next year his mother died. Loss kept teaching him the old Buddhist lesson that nothing holds still. He came to see impermanence not as a tragedy to resist, but as the very texture of life, to be met with open eyes.

In 1686 he wrote the poem that became one of the most famous haiku ever written:

old pond —
a frog jumps in,
the sound of water

It is so simple that people often miss what’s happening. The stillness of the pond, a sudden small splash, and then stillness again. The whole poem lives in that one instant when the silence is broken and you realize how deep the silence was.

From 1684 on, Bashō spent much of his life on the road. He walked the countryside of Japan in a monk’s robes and straw sandals, carrying almost nothing, following in the footsteps of the wandering poet-monk Saigyō, who had lived five centuries earlier. Travel for Bashō was a spiritual practice, a way of letting go of home and security and meeting each moment new. His greatest journey began in the spring of 1689, when he and his student Sora set out into the remote north. That five-month walk of well over a thousand miles became Oku no Hosomichi, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. It opens with the thought that the months and days are themselves travelers, and that each year passing through is a wanderer too. To travel, for Bashō, was simply to live honestly with the way things are.

He sometimes said that he had thought about becoming a monk, but had instead given his whole life to a single line of poetry. His poetry was the path. In his last years he spoke of karumi, “lightness”: not withdrawing from ordinary life, but touching it gently, with nothing extra added, poems as plain and clear as water.

He died in Osaka in 1694, on one last journey, surrounded by his students. His farewell poem was:

sick on a journey —
my dreams go wandering
over withered fields

Bashō reminds us that the sacred is not somewhere else. It is in the frog, the cicada, the autumn wind, the passing of a single moment, if we can become quiet enough to notice.

More poetry by Matsuo Basho

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