Some Lessons from Bashō

By Adam Sedia

The Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō (松尾 芭蕉) (1644-1694) “reinvented” the haiku and gave the form “a power and seriousness [it] rarely had before.” (Hass, p. 3.) By his thirties he had mastered traditional Japanese verse, including the haiku form, but he sought new boundaries. He turned back to his books and studied Chinese poetry, particularly the poets of the Tang Dynasty (618-905). From the Chinese models his poetry took on “a plainness and depth very different from the rather showy and playful poems in the Japanese tradition.” (Id.)

Before examining the poetry itself, it is helpful to understand the philosophy behind it. Fortunately, Bashō left a record of his views on poetry. He collected his philosophy of poetry in an essay called simply “Learn from the Pine.” In a spare, aphoristic style, he provides instructions on how to write good poetry.

The title comes from his admonition:

Learn about pines from the pine, and about bamboo from the bamboo. (Id., p. 233.)

Poetry is about experiencing, not classroom learning. Only a direct experience of the poetic object can give the truest impression of what it is. All the scientific literature in the world cannot improve upon the actual experience of sitting in front of a pine tree and observing it. In a similar vein:

Make the universe your companion, always bearing in mind the true nature of things – mountains and rivers, trees and grasses, and humanity – and enjoy the falling blossoms and the scattering leaves. (Id.)

Later, Bashō gives his implicit explanation:

Every form of insentient existence – plants, stones, or utensils – has its individual feelings similar to those of men. (Id., p. 237.)

Even observing the objects themselves, it is easy to forget their true nature, still bearing the impressions of what life has conditioned one to think of a mountain or a river. The poet must strip away all preconceptions and behold the thing-in-itself to gain the truest experience of it – the experience that produces poetry.

Elaborating further on this theme, Bashō advises:

Don’t follow in the footsteps of the old poets, seek what they sought. (Id.)

Poetry does not lie in imitation. Each poet’s experience is his own, expressed through the transmissible medium of words. Copying another poet’s style is to stifle one’s own experience and emotions and adopt those of another as a mask. The product of such efforts always seem stilted and hollow. But avoiding this is not to discard tradition entirely. The power of the old poets lies in the intensity of the experiences that produced their poetry.

The basis of art is change in the universe. What’s still has changeless form. Moving things change, and because we cannot put a stop to time, it continues unarrested. To stop a thing would be to halve a sight or sound in our heart. Cherry blossoms whirl, leaves fall, and the wind flits them both along the ground. We cannot arrest with our eyes or ears what lies in such things. Were we to gain mastery over them, we would find that the life of each thing had vanished without a trace. (Id.)

Here Bashō echoes Laozi in the Tao Te Ching, recognizing constant flux in life and in the world, and the necessity to flow with it. We cannot stop the flow, and resisting it is exhausting and futile. The tree that survives is supple, bending with the winds, while the rigid tree breaks and dies. True poetry follows this philosophy, not seeking to stop the unstoppable flow of nature, but to capture a moment of existence as “changeless form.” In this sense it treads a middle ground:

The secret of poetry lies in treading the middle path between the reality and the vacuity of the world. (Id., p. 234.)

Movement is at once reality and vacuity: an image exists at a given moment, yet is constantly disappearing as the world moves and changes. Poetry draws reality from vacuity, fixing the image long after it has changed, and does so because the image is gone, leaving only its impressions. In this way poetry “flows” with the world’s vacuity while preserving its reality.

Bashō also provides insights on poesis:

One must first of all concentrate one’s thought on an object. Once one’s mind achieves a state of concentration and the space between oneself and the object has disappeared, the essential nature of the object can be perceived. Then express it immediately. If one ponders it, it will vanish from the mind.

. . .

When we observe calmly, we discover that all things have their fulfillment.

. . .

Is there any good in saying everything?

. . .

One needs to work to achieve enlightenment and then return to the common world. (Id., pp. 234, 237, 238.)

Bashō’s methodology is not all that foreign to the Western reader: poetry is about the transformation of an object, or metaphor. Observation is the key to achieving transformation. For Bashō, the end of observation is to “become one with” the object, and by “stepping into” the object, the poet may experience its true essence, as opposed to the mere perception. This is the transformative process that produces a poem from a mere observation, the simultaneously the “fulfillment” of the thing and the “enlightenment” of the poet of which Bashō speaks.

Particularly insightful is Bashō’s rhetorical question, “Is there any good in saying everything?” To capture an object’s “essence” is implicitly to strip away everything extraneous. Say too much, and the essence is drowned in noise. And often, if not always, what is left out says as much as what is said. William Carlos Williams was a master of omission, with his short, imagery-dense poems raising more questions than they answered simply by their omissions. If all a reader’s questions are answered, the poem ceases to be art and becomes mere description.

Bashō’s haiku show his ideas in practice:

First day of spring –
I keep thinking about
the end of autumn.

元日や思へば淋し秋の暮
Ganjitsu ya / omoeba sabishi / aki no kure

An ancient pond,
the frog leaps:
the silver plop and gurgle of water.
—Matsuo Basho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

古池や 蛙飛び込む 水の音
Furu ike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto

Moonlight slanting
through the bamboo grove;
a cuckoo crying.

ほととぎす大竹薮を漏る月夜
Hototogisu / ō takeyabu o / moru tsuki yo

The beginning of art –
a rice-planting song
in the backcountry.

風流のはじめや奥の田植歌
Fūryū no / hajime ya oku no / ta ue uta

Lightning
shatters the darkness—
the night heron's shriek.
—Matsuo Basho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

稲妻や闇の方行く五位の声
Inazuma ya / yami no kata yuku / goi no koe

The second, third, and fifth of these haiku follow a pattern: description of a scene in nature interrupted by an animal’s sound – a frog, a cuckoo, and a heron, respectively. In these, Bashō contrasts the stillness and permanence of the background with a single movement, framing eternity in a single moment. In all three, the presence of the animal is indicated only by its sound: the birds’ calls and the frog’s splash. That the animate subject remains unseen achieves two effects. First, it makes the animal seem “ghostlike” (especially the birds, heard in the darkness), emphasizing the evanescence of the living animal against eternal nature. Also, it places the reader more directly in the scene, achieve the effect of a movie rather than a painting by appealing to more than the merely visual. But the visual effect is striking, too: all three poems present a vivid description that immediately conveys an impression of the scene using a minimum of words.

The remaining haiku are more philosophical in tone. The first is a meditation on the evanescence of human life. The narrative voice describes contemplating the “end of autumn” – a not-so-subtle metaphor for death – at the beginning of spring, analogizing the human lifespan to the passing of a single year’s seasons, and – more importantly – describing the recognition in youth of the inevitability of aging and death. Thus the description of a simple contemplation takes on much greater significance

The third haiku sees in the songs of the almost certainly illiterate country-folk the origins of art. Here the poet does not merely see commonality with the backcountry farmers, he gives them credit for originating the art he practices. This is a characteristically Confucian view adopted from China early on and heavily imbued in Japanese thought. Confucius taught that the Shijing, a collection of ancient folk-songs, contained wisdom to govern personal conduct and even statecraft. Like Confucius, Bashō sees in the country-folk’s songs the wisdom and truth that create high art.

Bashō achieves these profound statements using only fifteen syllables, demonstrating a remarkable efficiency of language, illustrating the truth of his maxim that there is no good in saying everything. He says only what he needs, which turns out to be more than enough to stir contemplation in the reader.

And Bashō’s lessons and example apply far beyond the realm of haiku, to poetry generally. Poetry comes from direct experience, not imitation. Poetry is fundamentally metaphor, which requires peace and contemplation to grasp the nature of an object fully. Poetic skill lies as much in omission as in inclusion. Taken to heart and practiced assiduously, these lessons are valuable keys to poetic craft generally, regardless of form, style, or even language.

Source

The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, & Issa. Ed. & tr. Robert Hass. The Ecco Press, 1994.