Where the River Goes

A while back on Caught by the River Rob St John reviewed Allan Burns' anthology Where the River Goes: The Nature Tradition in English Language Haiku (2013).  He found that 'the most enjoyable bits of this fascinating but slightly frustrating book are the haiku themselves' and criticised the contrast between the introduction's bleak view of the environment with what is conveyed in the subsequent poems.  Nevertheless, Burns' introduction does contain an interesting historical survey of the field, beginning in the sixties when nature-oriented poems were at the heart of the growing American haiku movement.  From this early period he includes the work of James W. Hackett, O Mabson Southard and Nick Virgilio, whose highly concise ‘lily’ and ‘bass’ proved particularly influential.  In the late sixties and early seventies nature haiku written by poets like John Wills and Robert Spiess became more specific  - ‘instead of generalized fish and butterflies, they wrote with field-guide precision of muskellunge and mourning cloaks’.

In the seventies such subject matter became less central within English-language haiku writing, but something of a revival was sparked by the work of Charles B. Dickson, a retired journalist who produced a significant body of work before his death in 1991.  Among this newer generation Wally Swist and Bruce Ross (compiler of The Haiku Moment) have been particularly devoted to nature-oriented haiku.  Poets of the mid-to late-nineties represent a third generation, often publishing via the internet. Burns highlights the work of Carolyn Hall (editor of a journal that focused on nature poetry, Acorn), John Martone (whose work resembles the minimalist poetry of Creeley and Corman) and the British poet John Barlow, whose Snapshot Press published this book.  I am embedding below a science animation produced in 2012 by Rob St. John that includes haiku by John Barlow which suggests how this writing is now being combined in new ways with sounds and images.

In his introduction Burns says that he has included mainly ‘type one’ haiku that refer exclusively to nature; type two haiku relate to both people and nature whilst type three are exclusively human-oriented.  This typology was devised by George Swede in 1992 and he estimated that the split between these approaches in English language haiku was about 20:60:20. Burns calculates that by 2013 pure nature haiku had become rarer, so that the split was more like 13:67:20. ‘Undeniably, haiku in recent years has witnessed a kind of anthropocentric creep that mirrors an accelerating alienation of humans from the natural world.’  He contrasts this with classical haiku: apparently about 90% of Fukuda Chiyo-ni's were on nature and many of Basho’s have no direct sign of humanity, although of course they can always be read metaphorically in terms of human thought and emotions.  I'd be interested to know how many 'type one' nature haiku suggest a whole landscape, by implying distance (birds on a lake, mountain mist) or uniting near and far (pool, moon).  Perhaps they all do and it is just a question of how far we are willing to imagine what is left unsaid.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Chiyo-ni standing beside a well, mid 1840s

Heard beyond the mountains

So it seems I have now been writing this blog for exactly ten years.  If I had considered this when I started and realised it was going to have more than one or two actual readers, I might have come up with a better name for it...  I recall being too eager to get down to it to think beyond the idea that it would be about 'some landscapes'.  That first post in November 2005 was about two works by Richard Long and Hamish Fulton combining sound, text and art - three ways of addressing landscape through culture that I have continued to write about ever since.  All the subsequent posts are still available on my clickbait-free sidebar, or they can be accessed through the index (itself now nearly 20,000 words long) or through the Google maps I recently added.  However, rather than look back on what I have covered over the years, I thought it might be good here to celebrate other people's blogs that I have particularly enjoyed, with a few autumnal images and quotes thrown in.

'The sun passes lower in the sky, bringing the quickening rush that starts the long winter months. Tresses of drying peppers spread like flames across sheds, turning the stone walls into scenes of tropical design. The elegant stems of onions that have spoked all summer above the swelling bulbs are plaited, woven together like hands in a dance, and hung out of the way of snow. Felled trees are hauled by donkey from the forests, wearing a glaze of lichens and ice. They’re split by axe throughout the day, the thud of blade against wood marking the hours, and stacked to face what is left of the sun.' 

This description is from 'Gathering In', an autumn 2011 post on Julian Hoffman's Notes from Near and Far.  His blog has formed the basis of a book, The Small Heart of Things, on the landscape of the Prespa Lakes in northern Greece.  In 2015 it seems more likely that a Twitter feed will lead to a book deal - Penguin recently won a bidding war over the Herdwick Shepherd.  According to the Guardian, The Shepherd’s Life 'may well do for sheep what Helen Macdonald did for hawks'.  Before H is for Hawk, Helen (as Pluvialis) wrote Fretmarks, a personal blog which flew wherever it wanted - there were obviously a lot of hawk photos but also thoughtful reflections on poetry and nature writing, plus on one occasion a little appreciation of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion (that's a JSBX T-shirt being worn by Plinius in the photo accompanying this blog).  Some writers have obviously been told to write blogs by their publishers but there are those who clearly do them for the love of sharing their experiences in the landscape - Melissa Harrison's Tales of the City, for example.  I often turn to Caspar Henderson's A New Map of Wonders for inspiration - today he has quoted Barry Lopez: 'the first lesson in learning how to see more deeply into a landscape was to be continuously attentive...

Julian Hoffman, photograph for 'Gathering In', 2011 

Both myself and Mrs Plinius are great admirers of the writings of Ken Worpole.  The blog he started with Jason Orton, The New English Landscape, contains short essays on some of the themes I have covered on this site.  British writing, music and film have all been covered in recent years on Landscapism, which I hope Eddie manages to keep going while he pursues his academic studies.  Similar ground has been covered by the collective blog Caught by the River, for which many of those I am talking about here have written short pieces.  Collaborative sites can be as transitory as personal ones, but this one, with its publications, social events and festival appearances, looks like it will become a long-lived and well-loved British institution.  Another excellent blog with many authors is hosted by The Wordsworth Trust.  It's focus is on Romanticism broadly, not just Wordsworth - I have a post on Robert Southey's 'The Cataract of Lodore' coming up on it soon.

Some of the earlier literary blogs posted diary entries of great authors - you can for example read what Henry David Thoreau had to say about cranberries on this day in 1853.  The John Clare Weblog started over a year before mine and reached its 1000th post sometime ago.  Each entry contains a poem or text, often linked to the changing seasons.  From November 2005 here is the first stanza of one of Clare's autumn poems which seems particularly apt in a week of such blustery weather.

I love the fitful gust that shakes
The casement all the day,
And from the glossy elm tree takes
The faded leaves away,
Twirling them by the window pane
With thousand others down the lane. 

The web is full of poetry sites (the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog has a long list of links) but one of the most visually appealing is 'Beyond the Pale', a blog by Tom Clark.  This is the American Tom Clark, not to be confused with Thomas A. Clark who also has a more infrequent blog, highlighting his art works and new publications. 'Beyond the Pale' covers a wide range of material but it does sometimes feature poems with landscape imagery; a recent post for example centred on a translation of Hsieh T'iao's 'Viewing the Three Lakes', from which these are the opening lines

Red clouds mirrored where the waters meet.
From the red terrace -- birds returning,
the encircling plains, mosaic of river isles.
Inklings of spring's luxuriance
as autumn's last yellows fade.

Last yellows, from my window today

These autumn images keep reminding me of the transitory nature of blogs which may aspire to the form of trees but are more often like leaves, sustained only for a short time.  I am sure many psychogeography and walking blogs have been started over the last ten years; among those still being maintained are the Psychogeographic Review,  Under a Grey Sky (Berlin), Urban Adventure in Rotterdam,  East of Elveden (Norfolk) and Particulations (theory).  My two favourites (both with exemplary accompanying Twitter feeds) are Lines of Landscape and The Fife Psychogeographical Collective.  The FPC now have a book based on the blog, From Hill to Sea, which I am sure is excellent.  The most recent dispatch from Fife had an Autumnal theme and included these lines from Rilke's Letters on Cézanne

'At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.'

Sadly, over all these years, I have never found any other blogs devoted to the history of landscape art.  I had hoped that the Internet's 'long tail' might have given rise to blogs devoted to the art of Cézanne or Balke or Altdorfer, to the Nanjing School or Aeropittura or early seventeenth century copper plate landscapes... perhaps they do exist and I've failed to come across them.  For garden history I always used to enjoy Gardenhistorygirl - silent since 2014 - but the Garden Visit site's blog continues and it sometimes discusses interesting historical questions (e.g. on whether Zen gardens really were 'Zen').  I like the way its latest post begins: 'hard to know what I would write if the Sunday Express asked me to do a few hundred words on garden design but I can put some helpful advice in one sentence: 'don’t take advice from Alan Titchmarsh''.

No doubt someone has already written an academic study of blogging's role in art practice.  Chris Drury has used microcosm and macrocosm to document three of his projects, but it has been dormant since 2012.  He is one of the artists whose progress I follow through Peter Foolen's blog, a reliable source of intelligence on upcoming exhibitions by people like herman de vries, Roger Ackling, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Alec Finlay and the artists wrote about ten years ago today, Hamish Fulton and Richard Long. Alec Finlay's own blogspot site is probably no longer the optimal means of keeping up with his activities but, like Chris Drury, he has used blogger to chart the progress of certain projects.  Five years ago I wrote about The Road North, in which he and Ken Cockburn mapped Basho's famous journey onto the geography of Scotland.  Station 47 was their temple of Zenshoji, Stonypath, the garden created by Alec's parents.  In this post Alec quoted an autumn poem by Basho (the translation is by Cid Corman).

all that night
the autumn winds being heard
beyond the mountains

Alec Finlay, Autumn (fallen), 2010 

Music and sound art blogs have come and gone - the useful Field Reporter site for example seems to have become inactive a year ago.  It looked for a while as if Alex Ross would stop writing The Rest is Noise but he is still at it (I quoted him in a recent post about Mahler).  His latest post is about a 'mobile opera' performed out in the landscape, Hopscotch.  Some of the composers I have featured in my end-of-year landscape music surveys have kept blogs.  The Land Observations site documents the work of James Brooks which I first mentioned here in 2012.  Jez riley French has a blog for his field recordings but also another one, treasure hiding, that is more of an online notebook featuring art and photography as well as music.  Richard Skelton has one blog under his own name one for his Landings project.  The Corbel Stone Press which Richard runs with Autumn Richardson has its own elegant Wordpress blog - newest posts concern the latest edition of their journal Reliquiae.  (I will shortly be editing the first Reliquiae Digital Supplement in collaboration with flowerville, whose own blog engages with an intriguing range of writers).

There are more I should mention... hard to classify like The Art of Memory (the link I've embedded here is to posts labelled 'sea'), or at the outer limits what I cover on this site: Friends of the Pleistocene, Ecology without Nature.  Design, with its constant flow of striking images and new ideas has been an ideal subject for blogs, some of which have grown into more ambitious undertakings (two of my neighbours run an excellent site called Dezeen which often features nature-related design and landscape architecture).  I have kept links here to a few blogs that investigated landscape futures even though they are no longer being updated: Deconcrete, Landscape and Urbanism and the much-missed Pruned.  But the best of these speculative blogs, indeed the finest blog of any kind I have encountered, Geoff Manaugh's BLDGBLOG, passed its tenth anniversary last year.  I'll end by repeating here what Geoff wrote then, thanking you 'for reading, commenting, critiquing, and following along, whoever and wherever you are.'

And the snow melted in one breath

I said in an earlier post that I might return at some point to In the Field, the book of interviews with field recordists put together by Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle of CRISAP.  Here I want to highlight the work of one of their interviewees, Hiroki Sasajima.  He makes, for example, an interesting observation in relation to, Colony, a collage of insect sounds recorded at various locations over the course of three years.  "In Japanese culture, appreciating the sounds of insects is a tradition that goes back to olden times, their sounds enjoyed as songs, as a voice or as a message from another creature ... I found some research that showed evidence that Japanese brains have learned to deal with the insect voice as a creature's voice while European and American brains apprehend insect sound as noise."  Some of these theories about the Japanese brain may be scientifically dubious but there is no doubting the special place insects like the cicada have in Japanese culture (one of Basho's most famous haiku, for example: 'In the silence of a temple, / A cicada’s voice alone / Penetrates the rocks').  Among The 100 Soundscape of Japan designated by the government in 1996 to combat noise pollution there are several that reflect this love of insects: suzumushi (bell-ringing insects) in Miyagino, cicadas at Yama-dera, tree crickets on the banks of Yodo River.



The track embedded above was recorded by Sasajima in a bamboo grove: "At night," he explains, "when the snow absorbed all the sound, the place was silent, a place of no sound.  Then, with sunrise, the temperatures heated up and the snow melted in one breath."  Much less accessible on first listening, Into the Nothings, was "recorded in the 'sea of trees' in Fuji.  The sea of trees in Fuji is famous as a mystery zone where you cannot use a compass and where once you have lost your way you will never return."  It sounds like a legend but this place is very real: iron in the volcanic soil prevents mobile phones from working and (according to an article on Tofugu) 'the tree coverage in Aokigahara is so thick that even at high noon it’s entirely possible to find places shrouded in complete darkness. It’s also mostly devoid of animals and is eerily quiet. Hearing a bird chirping in the forest is incredibly rare. The area is rocky, cold, and littered with over 200 caves for you to accidentally fall into.'   It is a notorious site for suicides (second only to the Golden Gate Bridge) and Sasajima' field recording conveys an atmosphere of claustrophobic menace.

There is a long association between caves and music (exemplified by two of my previous posts here, on Felix Mendelssohn and Akio Suzuki, visiting Scotland nearly two centuries apart).  Water drop, the clip embedded below, was recorded by Sasajima at the Nippara limestone cavern near Tokyo.  Inside, the dripping water from a stalactite reverberates inside a suikinkutsu, a vessel usually installed in Japanese gardens (as I described in an earlier post on the way sound artist Jem Finer had adapted the idea).  Reading about this place I thought of Wallace Stevens' poem 'Anecdote of the Jar', which landscape writers often quote to explain the way art can turn nature into culture ('I placed a jar in Tennessee, / And round it was, upon a hill. ... / The wilderness rose up to it, / And sprawled around, no longer wild...')  In the Nippara caves a jar has been placed in the ground to turn the natural action of rainwater into an endless piece of music, of which Sasajima's composition is no more than a drop.  And he is not the only Japanese artist to have recorded these underground soundscapes: Eisuke Yanagisawa made a whole album, Into the Cave, there and observed that 'the cave itself can be regarded as a huge suikinkutsu. Once stepping into the cave, I became a part of the natural sound sculpture, listening to it and resonating with it.'

'Message to Basho', Kiyosumi Garden

Thomas Joshua Cooper, Ritual Object 

(Message to Donald Judd and Richard Serra), Derbyshire, 1975

©Thomas Joshua Cooper, Courtesy Haunch of Venison 

This is one of eighteen Thomas Joshua Cooper photographs currently on show at the Haunch of Venison gallery in London.  The pervading darkness and silvery highlights on every blade of grass are typical of his work, but the subject here is unusual.  Normally the foregrounds of his more intense close-up landscapes feature rocks, trees or dense undergrowth.  Here we have an enigmatic (found?) object, illuminated in such a way that the light seems to emanate from within.  Nevertheless it fits with what Thomas A. Clark said about the third step in looking at a Thomas Joshua Cooper image, as mentioned here before. 'First we admire its scale and intensity, the 'deep blacks and velvety whites' of its surface.  Secondly we penetrate to the place itself - not some famous site, just an assemblage of trees, foliage, water.   Finally the viewer starts to feel the spirit of the place, which ‘will always be alien, unhuman, beyond our preconceptions.’'

Thomas Joshua Cooper, A Premonitional Work 

(Message to Caspar David Friedrich and Francis Frith), 

Blaenau Ffestiniog, Gwynedd, Wales, 1992

©Thomas Joshua Cooper, Courtesy Haunch of Venison

Whatever the Ritual Object is, the title of the photograph refers us to the minimalist sculptures of Donald Judd and Richard Serra.  This whole exhibition is based on Cooper's 'ongoing conversation' with predecessors and contemporaries: a Message to Paul Strand and Agnes Martin found in New Mexico, a Message to Minor White in Derbyshire, a Message to E.S. Curtis in The Trossacks.  The way these cultural reference points emerge from the interface between art and landscape reminded me of an artist Cooper has often shared gallery space with in Scotland, Ian Hamilton Finlay.  It also made me think of the way artists and writers stimulate Alec Finlay's work, as in his Scottish reworking of Basho's The Narrow Road to the Deep North. There is a small photograph of light filtering through leaves in the Thomas Joshua Cooper exhibition: 'Message to Basho', Kiyosumi Garden.  This late nineteenth century garden in Tokyo contains a monument with Basho's famous frog poem carved into it, but Cooper makes a more subtle connection with the poet in his haiku-sized image of an ordinary moment stilled, so that it seems at the same time transient and timeless.

Thomas Joshua Cooper, A Premonitional Work, The River Findhorn

(Message to Timothy H. O'Sullivan), 

Morayshire, Scotland, 1992

©Thomas Joshua Cooper, Courtesy Haunch of Venison

The Road North

When Basho and Sora set off in 1689 on the Narrow Road to the Deep North, they were traveling into the past, to re-visit landscapes with long held poetic associations.  As Haruo Shirane says in Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory and the Poetry of Basho, these places (utamakura) had traditionally served as 'cultural nodes in the poetic tradition', where travelers could hope to compose poems that would match the famous examples of their predecessors.  Shirakawa Barrier for example, features in a tenth century poem by Taira Kanemori and is then treated by Priest Noin in 1025, by Minamoto Yorimosa in 1170, and by later poets like Saigyo and Sogi (whose account of his journey to the Shirakawa Barrier in 1468 is a precursor of The Narrow Road to the Deep North).  Interestingly Basho seems to have been more easily inspired to compose haikai where an utamakura disappoints his expectations - at Shinobu Mottling Rock, for example, where he and Sora find the renowned rock lying face down, half buried in the grass.  And as he made his way north Basho established new haimakura, haikai places that do not appear in the work of earlier poets like Saigyo and Sogi.  As Basho's follower Kyoriku wrote, "travel is the flower of haikai. Haikai is the spirit of the traveler.  Everything that Saigyo and Sogi have overlooked is haikai.'

A new sequence of hamaikura is now being established in Scotland by artist-poets Alec Finlay and Ken Cockburn, who are making their own journey inspired by Basho and Sora.  As their blog The Road North explains, they are creating a word-map 'as they travel through their homeland, guided by the Japanese poet Basho, whose Oku-no-Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Deep North) is one of the masterpieces of travel literature. Ken and Alec left Edo (Edinburgh) on May 16, 2010 – the very same date that Basho and his companion Sora departed in 1689 – and when they return, on May 16, 2011, they will publish 53 collaborative audio and visual poems describing the landscapes they have seen and people they have met.'  So far they have reached seven of the stations on Basho's journey - Scotland's equivalent of the rock at Shinobu and Shirakawa Barrier lie ahead (see map).  Nor have they yet got to a version of Nikko where, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I once made my own literary pilgrimage to see a station on Basho's journey north.  A few days ago they were at their Cascade of Silver Threads (Shiraito-no-taki) - the Falls of Bruar - and there, like Japanese poets, they were conscious of their own poetic predecessors, in this case Robert Burns, who wrote about the Falls in 1787:

Here, foaming down the skelvy rocks,
In twisting strength I rin;
There, high my boiling torrent smokes,
Wild-roaring o'er a linn:
Enjoying each large spring and well,
As Nature gave them me,
I am, altho' I say't mysel',
Worth gaun a mile to see.

from 'The Humble Petition of Bruar Water'

Mount Fuji seen from the beach at Tago

In Japanese literature certain place names, utamakura, have specific poetic associations. 'To mention Miyagino was to imply hagi, bush clover. Yoshinoyama implied cherry blossoms. Tatsuta(gawa) implied brightly coloured autumnal leaves. There were obviously such coloured leaves in autumn not only at Tatsuta, [both] in nearby Yoshinoyama and in far away Miyagino. But to speak of coloured leaves at Miyagino or cherry blossoms at Tatsuta violated decorum, or the hon'i of the place' (The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature). I have described here before references to Tatsuta and Yoshinoyama. Miyagino was visited by Basho on the Narrow Road to the Deep North, where he saw fields of bush clover, and there is a typical poem in The Tale of Genji: 'Hearing the wind sigh, burdening with drops of dew all Miyagi Moor, my heart helplessly goes out to the little hagi frond.'

Photographer John Tran has undertaken an Utamakura project to photograph these poetic places as they appear now. His photograph of Yoshino, for example, shows a bus parked by a dirty road. 'Utamakura were celebrated for their beauty, their literary associations, their emotive connotations, or some purely associative quality. Generations of poets visited and wrote about these sites, adding layer upon layer of depth and complexity to their mystique. Some survive as beauty spots in contemporary Japan, others have changed irrevocably in the intervening centuries. The former beauty spot of Tago no Ura, for example, on the Pacific coast south of Mount Fuji, is now notorious for pollution caused by paper mill effluent. Sites that are preserved as a consequence of their association in the public mind with historical culture draw such huge numbers of visitors that the attraction of the place itself is often supplanted by the overwhelming human activity that occurs there. The massive disparity between the high culture of uta and haiku sensibility and the everyday culture of advertising, cigarette butts and commuter trains forms the basis of the Utamakura Sites series.'

Tago no Ura was formerly famous for its white strand, wisteria and view of Mt Fuji. It was visited (at least in the imagination) by poets following in the footsteps of Yamabe no Akahito, the Nara period court poet whose famous poem in th Man'yoshu anthology depicts the mountain, seen from Tago Bay, under a flurry of snow.

Tago Bay near Eijiri on Tokaido, Katsushika Hokusai, c1830
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The grebes of Lake Biwa

Basho by Sugiyama Sanpû (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The keiki (landscape) style of Haikai was dominant in the period Basho was writing, with its fusion emotion and the external scene. Some of Basho’s verse appears to consist solely of a brief landscape description. For example, Haruo Shirane quotes a hokku written in January 1691: kakurekeri shiwasu no umi no kaitsuburi (hiding in the water – the grebes of Lake Biwa – at year’s end). However the wider context for this poem is provided by the season word ‘shiwasu’ which literally means “teacher running” and has associations of ‘the end of the year, when everybody is rushing about cleaning up and settling their financial accounts’, so that the author of the poem appears in contrast to be ‘a carefree, reclusive person, someone who has the leisure to observe grebes at the busiest time of the year… At first glance, the hokku seems focused on a seemingly minor, if not insignificant, detail, but it gradually expands in the eye of the beholder, creating a tension between the smaller object and the implied landscape, or between the specific moment and the larger river of time.’ (Haruo Shirane’s Traces of Dreams p49).

Scattered Stones at Nikko

Yesterday I came upon a blog which reproduced the Hamish Fulton work we have hanging above our computer: The Life of Scattered Stones: Seven One Day Walks in the Rain, Nikko, Japan April 1990. The difficulties of reproduction are at the heart of Hamish Fulton’s work. Our Hamish Fulton print is a record of his walks, but cannot reproduce the experience. It is number 9 of 250 and I sometimes wonder who has the other 249 and what Fulton would think of us all. We bought the print partly in memory of a special day spent at Nikko in 1998, when the old stones and mossy trees glistened in the mist just as they do in Fulton’s rain-washed photograph. Fulton made his walks at Nikko in April, the same month Basho passed through on his Narrow Road to the Deep North, three hundred and one years earlier. Basho felt wary of writing too much about the temple at Nikko and instead recorded his simple awe at seeing green leaves shining brightly in the sun.

There is monument to Basho which is away from the main tourist area and therefore possible to enjoy in solitude.

Nikko, August 1998

Fallen willow leaves

For landscapes in haiku, an obvious writer to consult is the poet-painter Buson (1706-83), famous for his objective style and visual imagination. For example, from 1742 this poem about a willow tree:

Yanagi chiri
shimizu kareishi
tokorodokoro

The translation posted in several places on the web is by Robert Hass: ‘The willow leaves fallen / the spring gone dry / rocks here and there.’ Earl Miner has translated the last two lines as ‘in fresh waters weathered stones scattered here and there.’

The poem seems to be a simple landscape, describing a scene encountered by Buson, but it is also about poetry and the passing of time. The willow tree alludes to a poem by Priest Saigyo (1118-1190) in which he lingers in the shade watching the reflection of the tree in rippling water:

Michi no be ni
Shimizu nagaruru
Yanagikage
Shibashi tote koso
Tachidomaritsure.

Buson is also referring to an encounter with the tree at Ashino by Basho (1644-94) on the Narrow Road to the Deep North. As Haruo Shirane writes, ‘Basho pauses beneath the same willow tree and before he knows it, a whole field of rice has been planted. In contrast to Basho's poem, which recaptures the past, Buson's poem is about loss and the irrevocable passage of time, about the contrast between the situation now, in autumn, when the stream has dried up and the willow leaves have fallen, and the past, in summer, when the clear stream beckoned to Saigyo and the willow tree gave him shelter from the hot summer sun. Like many of Basho and Buson's poems, the poem is both about the present and the past, about the landscape and about other poems and poetic associations.’ For Buson (as Miner puts it in Japanese Linked Verse), ‘Saigyo and Basho are gone from the earth, remaining however in the mind as a cherished idea shrouded in the mystery of memory.’