Hokku poem “On a withered branch”

This poem, brushed in his own hand in idiosyncratic but dynamic and swirling cursive calligraphy, melding kanji (Chinese characters) and kana (Japanese phonetic writing), is a seventeen-syllable hokku, now known as haiku, by Matsuo Bashō. Bashō is certainly one of the most famous of all Japanese poets, both in Japan as well as around the world. The modern international haiku poetry movement can be traced back to his popularization of this succinct poetic form.

The poem is one of Basho’s most famous, and one that he often inscribed on vertical poetry slips (tanzaku), as here, or on larger sheets of paper for mounting, sometimes with his own illustration or to accompany someone else’s painting. Here, the brilliant orange background may call to mind the color of the setting sun, but the plum branch is about to burst into bloom, creating (pleasurable) a visual dissonance with the meaning of the poem. The poem is signed Tosei 桃青, one of Bashō’s noms de plume, and reads:

枯枝に　からすとまりたるや　秋の暮
桃青

Kareeda ni
karasu tomaritaru ya
aki no kure

On a withered branch,
a crow has come to perch—
at dusk in autumn.
—Tōsei

(Trans. John T. Carpenter)

As the careful reader will note, the second line of the Japanese original here violates the requirement of a five-seven-five syllable structure, but if you are the greatest teacher of hokku, that is permitted. Though the master later created variants of this poem. The poem first appeared in the Eastern Diary (Azuma nikki 東日記), a poetry collection compiled by his pupil Ikenishi Gonsui 池西言水 in 1680 and published the following year. There, the second line was still nine syllables, but varied slightly: karasu no tomaritari.