Bashō

Poetry Within Images and Images Within Poetry 6/9/13

            “Haiku became more than simply another form of poetry: it became an expression of modern life” (Basho 321). When reading Matsuo Basho’s poetry this statement rings loud and true. Basho was considered a poet of popular literature, and within popular literature poets wrote about what was happening in everyday life, whether it was pretty or not (Puchner 318). The YouTube video compiled with Japanese images and haikus that are written by Matsuo Basho depict modern day life as it was for Basho.

            Several images are depicted before a haiku appears. The images are of people, landscapes, seasons, and a few maps. These images not only tell a story, but they may give a type of background to the Haiku. A “Haiku typically contains a “seasonal word” (kigo), which evokes a host of associations relating landscape to mood” (Basho 322). The images depicted in the YouTube video seem to associate the visual of the haiku that Basho has written.

            An example of this begins at 1 minute and 22 seconds into the YouTube clip. The second haiku is displayed, and it says “with the air of a century past / the fallen leaves on the garden” (Matsuo 1:22). This haiku tells us a season, autumn, due to the falling leaves, and what is happening. One hundred years have past and the people in the vicinity can feel it. The preceding pictures that associate with this haiku are of a man working on a riverbank with a weeping willow tree, and a man and woman floating in the river. (Matsuo 0:56). Then the viewer sees a woman presumably working with laundry (Matsuo 1:04), this is followed by the final image, a winter landscape. (Matsuo 1:12). These three images depict time passing, summer to winter, or spring to fall. Within the passing time the viewer sees the process of work happening. Maybe not a lot has changed in the fact that people must work to survive, but the seasons will always change and time will always continue to pass, and that is possibly what Basho’s haiku means.

            The poems and images were possibly paired together to lay out the haiku in images. A poem is full of images that the author creates, but images can be full of poetry that is simply not written. The images and poems go hand in hand, and in this case they are simply telling the same story, just in different ways. The compiler of this YouTube video has taken what they see when they read the haiku’s and placed the images with the words to share with all.

Work Cited

Basho, Matsuo. "The World of Haiku." The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Ed. Martin Puchner. 3rd ed. Vol. 2. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2013. 321-37. Print.

"Matsuo Basho." YouTube. YouTube, 09 Apr. 2010. Web. 09 June 2013.

Puchner, Martin. "Early Modern Japanese Popular Literature." The Norton Anthology of World Literature. 3rd ed. Vol. 2. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2013. 313-19. Print.