Moon and Finger 4 – How to Let Go
Welcome to Moon and Finger, a feature for addressing and discussing any haiku topic under the sun, in depth, but particularly haiku poetics. The feature is hosted by Orense Nicod and Keith Evetts, and eventually, we hope, by a variety of occasional invited guests. We aim to make it varied and challenging, serious and amusing. Host today is Orense Nicod
Old Pond, Still New
Part III The Sound
Part II closed on an observation: that old pond does not simply accumulate interpretations but generates them — that each attempt to stabilize the poem reveals further structures, further possibilities, as though the poem were less an object than an engine of interpretation. This is not what poems ordinarily do. Most poems, however great, yield their meanings and rest. Old pond does not seem to end. Part III is interested in why.
8. a pond, a frog
Bashō repeatedly praises simplicity, naturalness, and the avoidance of visible artifice. His remarks on haikai point toward the ordinary, the unforced, the apparently effortless. Against this background, a reading that uncovers nested structures, philosophical correspondences, and layers of linguistic organisation may seem to move in the wrong direction. The objection is an obvious one: surely old pond is only a frog jumping into a pond.
At first glance the objection seems decisive. It places the poem on one side — simple, transparent, self-sufficient — and the analysis on the other — complex, theoretical, overdetermined. But this opposition depends on a number of assumptions.
The first is a somewhat simplistic view of Bashō as a naive nature poet. Bashō was not merely recording a moment of perception or Zen insight. His practice, as preserved in his prose and in accounts from his students, shows a highly intentional poet deeply engaged with the haikai tradition — one who understood the weight of inherited associations and repeatedly chose to work against them. The simplicity his poetics praises is not naivety. It is an achievement that conceals rather than excludes depth.
The second is that simplicity and depth are opposites. They are not. Bashō’s simplicity is something much more demanding than the absence of structure. Structure operates most powerfully when it does not appear as structure at all, when the poem itself appears to arise without effort.
And finally, the most fundamental assumption is that what appears ordinary is simple. Ordinary perception is not necessarily simple. Its familiarity conceals the relations that make it possible. What the poem exposes, then, may be the hidden complexity of what already appears self-evident. Nothing in the poem itself forces a simple reading. Quite the opposite: if the poem were as transparent as the objection assumes, the history of its interpretation would be difficult to explain. Four centuries of readers have not merely disagreed about what the poem means; they have repeatedly discovered new ways in which it resists settling into a final meaning.
Simplicity here is not absence of structure. Precisely because the scene initially appears so self-evident, every small instability carries disproportionate force. The slightest uncertainty in syntax, perception, or relation propagates through an image the reader believed they had already understood. The simplicity of the poem is not a limit on interpretation but part of what produces it.
This is not a paradox. It is a mechanism. And it begins with two removals so quiet they can pass unnoticed.
Bashō removes the confirmation of causality. A frog jumps, water sounds — the sequence seems self-evident, yet the syntax refuses to fix it. And simultaneously he displaces the sound’s belonging: mizu no oto cannot be assigned a fixed position in the event. These two acts do not create two local ambiguities. They trigger a chain reaction, because everything the reader reaches for to stabilize the poem turns out to depend on what has already been destabilized. This destabilization is all the more powerful for what it touches. A frog jumping into a pond is not a mysterious or ambiguous event — it is the epitome of natural self-evidence, as unremarkable as a fish taking to water. The reader arrives with complete confidence that they know what they are seeing. That confidence is what the poem quietly dismantles: the more obvious the image, the more disorienting the removal of its scaffolding.
The visual scene dissolves into sound. Vision is destabilized because it becomes dependent on sound for its coherence. Is the old pond seen or imagined — before us, or reconstructed by hearing?
The sound itself is unmoored. It is not presented as a stable object because syntax refuses to assign it a fixed position in time. Is sound the effect of action? Is it simultaneous with it? Is it what the frog enters?
When syntax fails to resolve, the reader is pushed deeper to the level of structure itself. The poem is neither purely sequential, nor purely simultaneous, nor purely causal: no single reading is grammatically ruled out. What the reader reaches for instead is relation — the pattern of connections between the poem’s elements. But that pattern, as Part II showed, is itself a field of reversals rather than a stable configuration.
Therefore we can also describe the poem’s structure as a chain of destabilization: vision is undone by sound, sound by syntax, syntax by structure. But structure does not resolve either. It recurses.
What remains is a shifting field of relations between the poem’s elements. Structure is what becomes felt when vision, sound, and syntax fail to stabilize one another. This is why the poem feels like image dissolving into sound, sound into relation, relation into continuation.
What this essay has shown over its three parts is that old pond is structurally overfull relative to its surface simplicity. The half-cut refuses to fully separate or fully join, and the reversals mapped in Part II operate at every level simultaneously: frog and pond exchange positions, fūeki and ryūkō swap roles, and the image schemas invert rather than settle. These schemas arrive in unusual density — more than a poem of seventeen on should be able to activate — offering multiple embodied entry points into the poem’s structure. These elements do not simply add to one another; they are mutually reinforcing: the displacement of sound makes the removal of causality more acute; the half-cut holds both of these destabilizations in unresolved relation rather than allowing either to settle; the density of image schemas means that every attempt to find footing activates further reversals. The whole is less stable than any of its parts.
The effect of this accumulation is not confusion but pressure: the reader feels the poem as holding more than its surface shows, and that sense of hidden structure generates both footholds and the drive to find what they support. But each foothold turns out to depend on something that has already been destabilized. The reader cannot easily find purchase anywhere in the poem — not in the image, not in the syntax, not in the relation between the two — and yet feels at every moment that purchase is about to be found.
This has two consequences. First, the poem’s structural density and corresponding instability create a powerful sense of discovery whenever interpretation begins to cohere. Second, that discovery is immediately liable to destabilization.
Every reading that arrives — however precise, however earned — is unsettled by the simplicity of the image itself. A frog. A pond. The sound of water. Structural complexity pulls toward interpretation; analysis builds; meaning takes shape — and then the image reasserts itself in its bare particularity, refusing to carry the weight placed on it. The interpretive edifice dissolves back into the frog, the pond, the sound. And then, again, the felt crossing: complexity gathers once more.
This oscillation between the poem’s structural depth and the radical simplicity of its surface is not a tension to be resolved. It is the cycle: structure generates, image withdraws, the gap reopens, reading begins again.
9. Echoes
The poem’s generative instability is already suggested in the imagery itself, in the disturbance of the splash. Something continues after the moment of reading — an aftereffect, or resonance, in which what has been destabilized does not disappear but keeps returning in altered form.
Critical readings of the poem have tended to emphasize the instantaneous — the cut, the moment of awareness, the stillness revealed by the sound. But less attention has been paid to what follows the moment — the way the event continues to sound. In Japanese aesthetics this continuation would be called hibiki — resonance, the way one thing strikes and another answers, the way an event exceeds itself.
The concept is native to linked verse. In renga, hibiki names the resonance between adjacent stanzas — the way one verse calls and the next responds across the gap between them, neither complete without the other. A hokku opening doesn’t resolve; it solicits.
Hibiki comes from the verb hibiku, to echo, to reverberate, to resound. The root image is physical: a sound striking a surface and returning — a bell continuing to sound after it is struck, a voice coming back from a cliff face or a valley. Not the original sound but its continuation in another body, another space. The kanji 響 is itself composite — 郷 (hometown, place of origin) beneath 音 (sound). Sound returning to where it came from, or sound finding a home in something other than its source. The pond receives the splash the way a gong receives a strike — and then continues to sound. The frog is already gone. What remains is the resonance in the water, in the air, in the reader.
In Bashō’s poem this principle operates at every scale. The splash does not end where it occurs. It propagates — through sound, through silence, through relation, and quite literally in the mouth. Jeff Robbins writes in “Bashō on Haiku: 17 Statements”: “Basho advises that we speak the verse out loud to insure that the phrases have ‘resonance’ (hibiki) and do not ‘stagnate’ in the mouth — like water in a stream stuck behind a wad of fallen leaves, old, foul, and heavy — but rather flow with natural rhythm that resonates in the listener’s ear.”
Old pond moves through a sequence of repeating and echoing syllables where vowels carry forward and return, and the final oto arrives as if it has been moving through the poem all along. The language itself behaves less like description and more like vibration. The poem is not only a moment of awareness. It unfolds as a structure of resonance — inward through its own phonetics, outward through the silence it leaves behind.
Old pond is not the only famous haiku. The crow on a bare branch, the world of dew, the peony — these are admired, translated, anthologized across centuries. But they are not parodied in any comparable way to old pond. Readers encounter them, are moved, and most leave them intact. Something different happens with old pond.
Sengai Gibon writes a later Edo-period response:
the old pond —
Bashō jumps in
the sound of water
where the frog is replaced by the poet himself. It seems Sengai saw that the frog and the poet were not so easily distinguished, that the poem was about something larger than a frog and a pond.
One could object that Sengai’s parody is simple mockery, the frog replaced by the poet to deflate the poem’s solemnity. But the metapoetic reading does not depend on Sengai having intended anything more than a joke. The joke only works if the substitution feels apt — if the frog and the poet are already close enough that swapping them lands as recognition rather than absurdity. Parody presupposes the connection it exploits.
And there is something more precise still: whether Sengai understood what he was doing or not, his parody enacts the poem’s own dynamic. It entered the tradition of responses to old pond, made its intervention, and was immediately absorbed. Sengai’s version now part of what the poem carries forward, part of the ancient water. The mocker became the frog.
This is not an isolated case. Centuries of poets have written their own versions of old pond. The comment threads beneath this very essay filled with frog poems before anyone asked for them. Readers who had just spent an hour with a structural analysis of the poem wrote their own frog jumping into their own water within hours of finishing.
One could quip that haiku poets don’t need much prompting to offer a haiku as a response yet no other haiku of comparable fame produces this. Something in old pond specifically seems to compel a reader not merely to interpret it, but to enter it.
Old pond is sometimes described as overrated — a frog jumping into a pond elevated beyond its means by centuries of reverence, Zen mystification, and the authority of a tradition that has decided it is great. The charge deserves acknowledgment. Reverence is not argument. Cultural authority is not evidence. One can simply not like old pond; a haiku this famous inevitably loses some of its freshness.
But beneath reception and repetition, the poem remains a formal achievement, and not a slight one. Its structure continues to generate the very responses that question it.
There is a reason it still sounds to this day.
10. The Perfect Link
There is a particular feeling in reading old pond that I have come to recognize. An interpretation arrives — solid, earned, satisfying — and then, at some point, it has to be let go. Not abandoned as wrong, but released, because the bare image reasserts itself and the interpretation that held a moment ago no longer fits what is actually in front of you. A pond. A frog. The sound of water. And then the letting go itself becomes the condition for the next arrival.
I know this feeling from somewhere else: the renga principle of linking and release. A poet contributes a verse, and then lets it go. The chain does not move forward because each poet holds onto what they have made — it moves because they don’t. Attachment, to the previous verses or to one’s own, would break the momentum. The form requires both gestures at once: to link is to contribute something genuinely new while remaining answerable to what came before, and then to release it so the next poet is free to turn it into something unforeseen.
This movement — contribution followed by release, presence followed by non-attachment — permeates Japanese aesthetics well beyond renga. It is mono no aware, the poignant awareness of things passing, and mujō, impermanence itself, treated not as a sad fact to be regretted but as the very condition that makes beauty perceptible. It is there in the tea ceremony’s principle of ichigo ichie — one time, one meeting — which holds that the gathering’s value depends on its being unrepeatable. An aesthetic sensibility built around impermanence will, almost by necessity, treat holding on as a kind of failure. Renga simply formalizes the principle into rule.
This is not merely a loose analogy. Renga has a formal rule against exactly this kind of clinging. Sarikirai prohibits a verse from looping back to repeat an image, theme, or mood already used — a poet may not hold onto what worked, may not return to it, may not let a successful contribution calcify into a recurring motif. The failure this rule guards against has a name of its own: rinne, a term borrowed directly from Buddhist vocabulary for the cycle of rebirth, the loop of attachment from which a practitioner seeks release. To get caught in rinne in renga is not simply a technical fault. It is, in the form’s own language, a failure to let go.
Old pond enacts this discipline within a single verse. The poem does not allow any single framework to become its permanent identity. It requires of the reader what renga requires of its poets: contribute, then let go.
Shirane shows, Bashō consistently valued the practice of linking (tsukeai) not as a secondary skill but as a core poetic intelligence, one that shaped his understanding of composition itself. Within this conception his hokku are best understood not as self-contained lyric utterances detached from renga practice, but as forms shaped by the same relational attentiveness that governs linked verse. They arise from a poetics in which meaning is not fixed within a single unit, but produced through adjacency, transition, and response.
A verse in renga does not carry a fully autonomous meaning independent of context; rather, its significance is partially constituted by its relation to what precedes and follows it. Meaning is distributed across the sequence, and stabilised only provisionally in each link.
Sengai linked. The comment threads beneath this very essay filled with frog poems, countless parodies, countless translations, countless essays .
Seen this way, old pond’s distinction is not that it does something foreign to haiku and renga, something other poems do not attempt. Every hokku belongs, at least potentially, to this culture of linking and release; every haiku, in its own way, asks something of mujō. Old pond’s achievement is not a departure from these principles but their intensification — the place where link and release, the impermanence that makes beauty perceptible, the refusal of rinne, all converge with unusual completeness in a single, minimal occasion.
It is possible to see “old pond” as the fulfillment of that ideal within a single verse: a one verse renga — a hokku that does not merely open the possibility of linking, as any hokku might, but that has internalized the entire movement of link and shift within itself. The room of poets is replaced by a single reader, alone with the poem, repeatedly receiving and releasing.
11. Passing Through
After ten sections of close reading and theoretical elaboration, my own conclusion may seem counterintuitive. “Old pond” does not require any of this context. I do not, myself, locate the poem’s meaning in the structural observations traced across these three parts, or in any interpretation built upon them — not the chiasm, not the image schemas, and not even the renga argument I have just spent a section building.
Bashō’s hokku solicits response so completely that it creates a form of interpretive momentum — a forward pressure that does not stop at any single reading but carries the reader, link by link, into the next one.
Ryūkō and fūeki are, in this light, only another name for link and shift. The individual contribution that must depart from what precedes it in order to mean anything — that is ryūkō. The tradition that receives the departure and is renewed rather than broken by it — that is fūeki. What Part I and Part II traced inside a single hokku is the same mechanism renga performs, verse by verse, across an entire sequence. And this is not confined to a single register. The same dynamic recurs at the level of image, at the level of structure, and at the level of reading itself: as departure and return, cut and reversal, interpretation and release.
There are conflicting accounts of whether “old pond” was composed as the opening hokku of an actual renga session. If it was — and it may have been — then Bashō was not making a general philosophical statement about tradition and the individual. He was making it in a room, to specific poets, about what they were all about to do together.
We can imagine the scene. Before anyone has written a verse, Bashō places old pond before the assembled poets. Perhaps it draws a laugh first in its unexpectedness. But the instruction is precise: this is what we are about to enter. The tradition. The ancient water. And what each of you will add to it — your verse, your voice, your individual contribution — will be absorbed the way the frog disappears into the sound it makes. The verse matters, the sound matters, but it is immediately taken up into the tradition that receives it and will outlast it. Let your ego disappear into what you contribute. The water speaks. The frog is the occasion.
That is, in effect, what the essay is doing here. Three parts of structure, theory, and argument, offered and then released — not because they are wrong, but because holding onto them past the point of use would be its own small failure of sarikirai. The analysis is a contribution. It is not the poem.
There are numerous accounts of Bashō favoring demonstration over explanation when teaching — breaking objects, gesturing, showing rather than defining. Old pond may be the poem-equivalent of this method. He does not tell the assembled poets what tradition and individual contribution mean to each other. He breaks the tradition in front of them. The instruction is not abstract. It is enacted, in real time, on the very kigo the room would have expected him to honor. He did not merely enter the tradition — he broke it. The splash that became old pond had never been a poetic subject. The hon’i of kawazu was its song, and Bashō chose the sound that was not the song, the moment that classical poetry had never thought to look at. He departed from the vertical axis in a way that renewed it. The allegorical instruction to the assembled poets is therefore not simply: let your ego disappear into what you contribute. It is: break the tradition precisely. Know it so thoroughly that your departure from it creates something that immediately belongs to it.
Submission and revolution are not opposites here. They are the same gesture. And the splash immediately became tradition — the revolutionary act absorbed into the ancient water, changing what the water sounds like from that moment forward.
When Bashō was finalizing the poem, it was Kikaku — one of his most gifted disciples — who proposed yamabuki ya as the opening phrase. The yellow mountain rose, classical companion of the frog, the expected seasonal world correctly arranged. Two different things juxtaposed: flower and frog, color and sound, the vertical reservoir activated and obeyed. The things counted. The things remembered. The scene complete.
But not passed through.
Bashō chose furuike ya instead. He does not juxtapose two different things. He takes one thing — the pond — and passes through it until it becomes two states of the same thing at the moment of contact. The pond before the splash and the pond after are not the same pond. The frog reveals this. That is the difference between counting things and passing through them. Kikaku was outside the scene, arranging it. Bashō is inside the pond when it sounds.
In Jeff Robbins’ selection of Bashō’s letters and sayings, “Bashō on Haiku: 17 Statements,” he includes the following passage by Bashō: “In poetry is a realm which cannot be taught. You must pass through it yourself. Some poets have made no effort to pass through, merely counting things and trying to remember them. There was no passing through the things.”
The poem engineers exactly that passing through.
It would be a mistake to treat the chiasm as interpretation — as if the poem were pointing toward a hidden philosophical model of exchange between opposites. The poem does not point. It performs. And what it performs is not balance or reconciliation but instruction by enactment.
The structure does not describe the relation between fūeki and ryūkō. It trains perception to undergo it.
At the moment of the splash, nothing is explained — something happens. And in happening it reorganises how the relation between things is perceived. The frog and pond are not symbols standing in for concepts. They are the minimal conditions required for a transformation in attention.
To read the poem is therefore not to decode it but to repeat it at the level of cognition: to move from separation to contact, from contact to reversal, and from reversal back into a renewed field of separation. The poem is not about this movement. The poem is this movement.
Which is why Bashō does not explain it.
He demonstrates it.
And then disappears into it.
old pond —
the essay jumps in
water’s sound
Coda:
After all this, it’s worth saying something simple. This structural reading does not master the poem. It shows why we cannot master it. For the practice of haiku, that may be the more valuable finding.
Analysis is sometimes treated with suspicion in some corners of English-language haiku. Moon and Finger begins here with Bashō the poet-theorist and a poem that both compels and resists interpretation, partly to push back against that suspicion.
The essay’s argument that the poem’s generative power is structural rather than enigmatic does not diminish its wonder. If anything, it helps explain why the wonder endures. Careful thought is one of the ways we encounter mystery.
A mystery whose wonder disappears when examined was never really mysterious or wondrous; it was merely obscure. The night sky is not less mysterious because astronomy exists. Examination doesn’t eliminate mystery, in the deeper literary or philosophical sense. Sometimes examination intensifies it.
If a poem remains alive through centuries of readings, the readings are evidence of its strength. Readers continue to find themselves standing before the frog, the pond, the sound, feeling that something remains unfinished.
Not because the poem has escaped examination.
Because it has passed through it and survived.
Orense Nicod
Next Tuesday we’ll have the first Chorus post where we look at the responses to the anonymous polls so far: thank you all. Meanwhile on Saturday, to mark Independence Day in the States Keith will present a contemporary haiku on beanpoles, that leads into a probe on Shiki and shasei, where the distance between Shiki and Bashō turns out to be less than expected. You may be as surprised as we were…
Reactions and questions to Part III are as always welcome. Some of my framings are deliberately provocative, so feel free to be provoked and discuss! Do you arrive at a settled interpretation or feel the poem turning?
Take the poll and let us know in the comments!
references:
Robbins, Jeff. Bashō on Haiku: 17 Statements.
Shirane, Haruo. “Beyond the Haiku Moment: Bashō, Buson, and Modern Haiku Myths.” Modern Haiku XXXI:1 (Winter–Spring 2000).
At the end of each post you will find a short anonymous poll related to the topic of the week (3 or 5 questions).
It asks not what you know about haiku but what you experience reading and writing it — whether an argument lands, whether a poem does what the essay claims it does, whether your practice matches the orthodoxies you’ve been taught. There are no correct answers. A no or a not yet is as valuable as a yes, and more valuable than a performance of agreement.
Periodic issues titled Chorus will return to what the polls have gathered — not to tally verdicts but to examine what the pattern of responses reveals. Where readers converge is interesting. Where they diverge is often more so. The more poets who participate the richer the picture.
and if you haven’t already take last week’s poll!
Discussion is welcomed in the Comments thread at the very end of this post. Meanwhile, if you would like to propose a topic you wish to see addressed, or better still, if you have an outline proposal for an article that you would be prepared to write—if accepted—please submit it to us via the submission form immediately below this text:
Why Moon and Finger? Zen, Chan, and Indian Buddhist texts cite the metaphor of a Finger pointing at the Moon with a caution: do not mistake the finger for the moon itself. Clinging to words or doctrines (the finger) obscures the awakened mind or truth (the moon). Thus, the analyses, views, and critiques of haiku in this feature are but the Finger. Haiku is the Moon itself, to be viewed by all. Views expressed here are those of the individual authors alone, except where otherwise attributed. They are very much open to discussion in the comments thread below. We all learn.
Introducing the hosts:
Orense Nicod is a French poet working across forms, with a particular focus on haiku. Born in Paris, she spent ten years of her childhood in South Africa before returning to France and writes in both French and English.
Her work has appeared in journals including Frogpond, Cattails, and The Asahi Haikuist Network. She has twice won first prize in the Haiku Society of America Rengay Awards, in collaboration with Joan Fingon (2021) and Anton R-kelian (2025).
A former teacher, she is raising her two children and her poetic expectations while co-hosting Moon and Finger with Keith Evetts on The Haiku Foundation.
Keith Evetts lives in Thames Ditton, Surrey. Life Fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. Aside from scientific papers, diplomatic telegrams, and local history articles, he’s written poetry of various kinds for sixty years, much of it sub rosa. Latterly host and managing editor of the Foundation’s re:Virals commentary feature since December 2021, one of the ten editors of the annual Red Moon Anthology, and an administrator of Facebook’s largest haiku group. Married with five children, cottage garden, grey parrot, and a sense of humour. His short bio is here.
Comments: further discussion is invited below. Comments will close when this post is automatically archived.
THF strives to maintain a safe and friendly environment for our readers and site participants. Participation in our offerings assumes respectful and appropriate behavior of all parties. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, for any reason, at any time.
If you see something you feel may violate our Code of Conduct, please report it to the appropriate moderator (the host of this post) or the President here.
Comments (32)
Comments are closed.
Thanks again for writing these ground-breaking essays. Of course I exemplify your overall theme with every fresh interpretation of my own, and yes, every time I read one of your articles I find myself writing another froggy haiku (many of them actually feature toads, but I keep that aspect hidden from the reader). However, I still feel you may be (over)reading interpretations or structures into the poem rather than responding to what is there. No problem with responding to the text rather than the intentions of the poet, or with using current rather than contemporary theories to do so, but you seem to dismiss the idea that the poem might have been written spontaneously based largely on a lived experience, or its pleasing combination of words might have arisen serendipitously, or perhaps the first line was swopped over minutes before it appeared in public, as Keith appears to suggest. These kind of things still happen to poets today. Thinking about it, I might define Basho’s poem as an anti-haiku, a term I like to use for those which are outwardly indistinguishable from conventional haiku but which in certain respects are trying to do the opposite (not a well known term, but it exists, I believe). You touch on this – you mention that Basho may have wanted to undermine traditional kigo associations and the comfortable structures used to deliver them (today I would use the term ‘haiku clichés’). You do not seem to think this interpretation can explain the continuing interest in the poem, however. Perhaps by avoiding those comforting structures, Basho arrived at a haiku that was very open – not just open to interpretation but also to causing feelings and inspiration. To me, that is different to, though compatible with, your interpretations about structure. Perhaps the poem did not contain embedded structures and metaphors but was principally an attempt to undermine expectations – but the tactics Basho employed were eventually those used by many poets in recent Centuries. In other words, could one describe the poem as ‘ahead of its time’? This could explain its popularity – it became at times a curio, then controversial, then – in recent decades – its openness and interpretability matched the current fashion within English language haiku culture. I do not know so much about its reception in Japan.
Mark — thank you. I love that your frogs are secretly toads. :)
On spontaneity: I don’t think it cuts against structural richness as much as it might seem. A poet can arrive at a structurally rich poem through lived experience without having planned it. The chiasm doesn’t require intention to exist as a feature of the text. The essay makes no claim about Bashō’s intentions beyond the likelihood of a metapoetic dimension, given that hokku by their nature speak to the situation of a renga, which is already a poetic situation.
Whether Bashō consciously designed the chiasm, whether some impulse toward reversal simply took that form, or whether it is entirely unintended is a question the essay deliberately leaves open. The claim is textual, not biographical. It is the text that constrains the reader’s experience, not the author’s intention.
That said, Bashō himself was not particularly spontaneous in the unreflective sense. The historical record shows a poet who agonised over small choices. The yamabuki ya substitution is evidence: he weighed alternatives and chose at the level of the single word. The spontaneity argument can sometimes romanticise him in a way the record doesn’t quite support, and, in my view, risks understating his craft.
On overreading: I don’t really believe in it as a category. Misreading is real — a reading can fail to be supported by the text, ignore what is there, or impose what isn’t. But “overreading” usually presumes a limit on interpretation that is difficult to define. For me, the question is whether a reading remains answerable to the text, not whether it is “too much.”
On anti-haiku: I’d gently push back on the framing. The poem doesn’t strike me as Bashō pulling against convention for the sake of novelty. Rather, it seems to find the point where permanence and change become the same event, which is very close to what haikai at its best was for him. Fueki and ryūkō are not opposites to be balanced but mutually constitutive. The unchanging reveals itself through change; the new is only recognisable against what endures.
You’re right that I don’t see the poem’s transgressive aspect as sufficient to explain its enduring fascination. What I find difficult to explain away is that readers often encounter old pond with little or no knowledge of kawazu tradition, kigo practice, or haikai conventions, and still become fascinated by it. If the poem’s power rested primarily in its subversion of convention, that effect would depend much more heavily on knowing the convention being subverted.
What I think the poem does — and this is where structure and experience meet — is loosen some of the habitual distinctions through which we organise experience. Observer and observed, sound and sight, stillness and movement, past and present: the poem never abolishes these distinctions, but it makes them unusually permeable.
This is why the multiple structural organisations available in the poem matter. The reader reaches for ways of stabilising the experience, and the poem offers several genuine possibilities: cycle, fusion, exchange, rupture, continuity. Each provides a real way of organising what is happening. Yet none fully settles the poem because each remains in tension with the others. You reach for cycle and rupture is also there. You reach for fusion and exchange resists it.
Rather than an empty openness into which anything may be projected, the poem feels to me more like a dense forest threaded with paths leading toward the pond. Each path is genuinely there. Each leads somewhere real. A reader may follow one path and feel they have found the poem, and that experience is entirely genuine. But the force of that discovery may also depend on the density of what surrounds it: paths not taken, possibilities sensed but unexplored, alternative organisations remaining available.
These structures are affordances: they do not determine interpretation, but they make certain interpretations possible.
And you’re absolutely right that the poem makes itself available to forms of feeling and inspiration that no structural account — including mine — can exhaust. The reception history you sketch is especially interesting. The essay doesn’t really address that question, but I suspect there is a fascinating story to be told there, including about the poem’s changing reception in Japan as well as abroad.
The essay takes one angle on the poem and makes no claim to exhaust what it is or does. The forest, as you suggest, has more paths leading to the pond than any single essay can follow.
fyi
dots of the frog disappearing
8th July 2026 https://smolspoetryjournal.blogspot.com
How wonderful! I wonder if there will be a surge in frog poems in haiku journals this month :)
Just checking whether comments are still being accepted – apologies for not responding sooner.
If comments are closed and you have something to add you can ask us to open them again in the comments of our newest post. Moon and Finger is meant for discussion :)
How about looking at it from the frog’s point of view? Why did it jump into the pond? Frogs don’t jump without a good reason, as it exposes them to predators. And they don’t need to go into the pond to mate and spawn, as they are already there, having overwintered in that pond. That leaves two possibilites: to hunt for food in the pond or to escape a predaor while having been hunting on land.
like,
sound of my water
a frog leaps into
the old pond
?
Or for the fun of it. It’s gotta feel good, don’t you think?
as in:
silent night
the screech of an owl
for the hell of it
Macqueens, Apr 2023
how about
ah the heat!
a frog jumps
out of its skin
?
Megan — yes, absolutely. And perhaps the synesthetic effect is where that joy lives — the way sound and sight and body fold into one another in the moment of the splash. The interconnectedness contains it.
And also all the parodies know it. They wouldn’t land if the joy weren’t already there in the original.
old pond —
fish filing
a noise complaint
splash —
eventually
a frog
old pond —
someone counting
the syllables
old pond —
I ruin it
with a metaphor
It is also joyful to join in. :)
Thanks, John. old pond gives us a structure of relations rather than a closed scene, and that naturally invites the question of what kind of situation could generate this movement in the first place.
If we take the frog’s point of view, the jump doesn’t need to be mysterious or exceptional. The pond isn’t an alien space they occasionally visit but part of their normal habitat and life cycle. The movement could be seasonal: returning to water for breeding, or simply shifting position within it. Other possibilities aren’t ruled out either — brief foraging, disturbance on land, a predator nearby. Or something simpler still: the poet. The poem stages an encounter, and that encounter may be enough to coincide with, or even prompt, the jump.
And if the poet’s presence may have prompted the jump, the poem doesn’t let the observer stay outside the event — the pond pushes back, and what began as watching becomes being watched.
None of these need to be exclusive. The poem leaves the cause deliberately open, which is part of why it stays alive in interpretation.
The inherited poetic colouring of kawazu — its associations with song, seasonal longing, and courtly tradition — may also be quietly at work here, but in a displaced form. If we allow a biological reading alongside the literary one, then the song may already have taken place, and the frog’s return to water becomes part of a wider cycle of movement between land and pond to spawn. On that reading, the old pond isn’t a static backdrop but something quietly renewed through the very logic of return.
Old pond is then renewed in several ways as is our interpretation of the poem.
Thank you Orense the observation offered by this essay is, for me, already a journey into the history and meaning of one of haiku’s masterpieces. thank you Orense for this.
I found myself thinking about it several times this week, also approaching it from a technical perspective:
I thought about the phrase “the sound of water” — which, according to my first simple understanding of haiku, seems almost too abstract? But is it precisely the recognizable sound of the frog jumping that stretches this rule?
I wondered: about water as sound as force or as taste, and as life-force itself. The conditions through which water takes different forms. The properties of water.
I grew up in an area they called “kikkerpolder” Frogpolder
Thank you .
Thank you, Henk. I’m really pleased it’s stayed with you—that lingering after the reading is, I think, part of what makes old pond so remarkable.
I think your point about “the sound of water” is one of the poem’s crucial choices. In one sense it is surprisingly abstract. Bashō doesn’t give us an onomatopoeic splash or try to imitate the sound itself; he simply names it. That slight abstraction seems to keep the phrase open, allowing it to function as more than a single, determinate noise. It can be heard as the frog’s splash, but it also remains simply “the sound of water”—a phrase broad enough to carry much more.
This is also very much the spirit in which I’m writing these essays. They’re not meant to fix the poem into a single interpretation, but to open further ways of looking at it. If the reading encourages someone to notice something they hadn’t noticed before—or simply to return to the poem with fresh eyes—then it has done what I hoped.
There has been a substantial body of historical commentary on old pond, often offering conflicting accounts of its genesis. I don’t address that directly here, not because it lacks interest, but because it has been explored elsewhere and doesn’t really shape the structural focus of the essay. Still, it is always fascinating to encounter the poem’s historical afterlives, as with the kawazu awase example you managed to translate. There is a great deal of rich material in that tradition.
And I smiled at “Kikkerpolder.” How wonderful that this poem should call up a place like that from your own life.
Thank you for the link i used ai to translate:
—
# COMPLETE ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF THE BLOG POST
**”Frog Match (Senka Edition) – Twentieth Round Verse Match”**
—
**【The ‘Frog Match’ (Senka Edition) – Twentieth Round Verse Match】**
*From ‘Frog Match’, included in ‘Genroku Haikai Shu – Shin Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei 71’ (edited by Ouchi Hatsuo, Sakurai Takejirō, and Kumo Masao, Iwanami Shoten, 1994)*
The ‘Frog Match’ took place in the spring of Jōkyō 3 (1686) at the Bashō-an in Fukagawa. Bashō, Sodō, Koya, Kyorai, Ransetsu, Sampū, Sora, and Kikaku gathered for a match of twenty rounds of frog-themed verses. The collective judgments and decisions were recorded by Senka.
The purpose was *”an attempt, using the device of a ‘verse match’, to vividly depict the true essence of the frog – freed from the aesthetics of the traditional waka poetry – through a total of twenty pairs, i.e. forty verses”* (from “The Landscape of the Old Pond” by Yachi Kaiichi, in *Tōyō Tsūshin*, December 2009).
The representative masterpiece of the waka tradition on this subject is:
*”The frog croaks – the mountain roses of Ide have scattered – oh, that I might have met you at the peak of their bloom”* (anonymous, *Kokin Wakashū*, Spring).
Kikaku, a leading disciple of Bashō, proposed during the match to use *”Yamabuki ya”* (Mountain roses!) as the first five syllables instead of *”Furu ike ya”* (Old pond!), but this was not adopted. Kikaku’s companion verse (*waki*) to Bashō’s opening verse (*hokku*) *”Old pond!”* is included in the *Yūran-shū* (a collection of Bashō’s linked verses), compiled by Gyōtai from Owari in Kansei 11 (1799):
> Old pond – / a frog leaps in, / sound of water. – Bashō
> On the young leaves of reeds – / a spider’s web. – Kikaku
*”The role of the companion verse is to add something not explicitly stated in the opening verse, thereby sharpening the focus of that opening verse’s world, making it more concrete, and drawing out a richer afterglow (yojō)”* (*Renga Dictionary*). Here, the spring landscape of the same time and place is gently added. The contrastive pairing (*aitai-zuke*) of the leaping frog and the spider’s web also evokes a touch of humour.
—
## ROUND ONE
**Left:**
Old pond – / a frog leaps in, / sound of water. – Bashō
**Right:**
Tender and frail – / a frog crouches on / a floating leaf, kana. – Senka
These two frogs are, as it were, deliberately set up. They become four, then six, and so fill one scroll. The quality of the upper and lower, the one and the other – there should be no rivalry among them.
—
## ROUND TWO – Left wins
**Left:**
In the rain, the frog’s voice grows louder – yet it is plaintive too. – Sodō
**Right:**
A mud-turtle and a frog sitting side by side at the gate, kana. – Bunrin
He composed a verse about the voice of frogs in the rice paddies of Oda at dusk, but the frog in the rain also has a loud voice. On the right – a frog that sullies its body in the mire, a neighbour of the turtle that delights in its own ineptitude. The phrase “sitting side by side at the gate” is particularly skilful, yet the loud voice of the frog on the left is striking.
—
## ROUND THREE – Left wins
**Left:**
*Kiro kiro* – and the frog guards my cheek, kana. – Rantsū
**Right:**
A frog that knows the sound of human footsteps – with a knowing look. – Koya
On the left: by the strength of the seven middle characters, the five closing characters are wonderfully placed. Among the many verses that end with *kana* (an exclamatory particle), for this verse in particular, one is asked which character should be used if not *kana*. It is truly a severe judgement – an example of the *Kishin Ittai* (Demon-God One-Body) style; perhaps it is for such verses as this. On the right: stopping its croak after hearing a footfall – this is interesting, but the left side was judged superior.
—
## ROUND FOUR – Left: tie
**Left:**
Beneath a tree – on a felt mat, a frog is laid, kana. – Suikō
**Right:**
Carrying its wife – and hiding in the grass, a frog, kana. – Dakushi
The frog that flits about, unable even to rely on the dew on the lawn – it vividly captures the heartless manner of those who view the blossoms. The frog carrying its wife and hiding in the grass – how must it be with human beings? This is amusing – hence a tie.
—
## ROUND FIVE – Right wins
**Left:**
The straw-raincoat seller – has seen it since last year, that frog. – Rika
**Right:**
For one ridge – the frog falls silent for a while, kana. – Kyorai
The left verse makes one think of “has seen it since last year, that water-rail” – one might wish it were so. Relying on the rain around the rice-planting season, the atmosphere of the straw-raincoat seller may yet be more artful. On the right: the conception that separates the paddy ridges is dense. Verses like “the croaking of frogs of long ages” also have their merits. It draws strength from the verse *”The multitude of frogs, bitterly mixed, at times utter a discontented cry”*, and wins.
—
## ROUND SIX – Left: tie
**Left:**
The bell has ceased – and the frog rests at the horse-station, kana. – Yūgo
**Right:**
Because it has legs – a frog not trampled by an ox, kana. – Kishū
The short spring night – the frog in the interval of the bell, awakening from a weary sleep with a heavy heart – profoundly moving. On the right: the snail *”has horns, yet does not trust in them”* – softly paraphrased. The frog on the field path is before one’s very eyes – hence a tie.
—
## ROUND SEVEN – Right wins
**Left:**
Where goes the monk? – the evening bell, the frog – also lonely. – Shugen
**Right:**
On a narrow path – into which grass will the frog enter? – Kōrin
The scene of hearing the evening bell after rain and returning to the temple sounds lonely, but the frog that wonders into which grass to enter is keenly observed. The right side is preferred over the left.
—
## ROUND EIGHT – Right wins
**Left:**
Evening shadows – and the frog calls for clouds over Tsukuba. – Yoshishige
**Right:**
At dawn – the frog begins the *Nenbutsu* prayer, kana. – Sensetsu
Left: the frog in each paddy field, during the evening that prays for rain towards Mount Tsukuba – the verse has a grand quality and atmosphere. Right: in the defenceless dawn, within the grass-thatched hut that at least begins the *Nenbutsu* – this is especially excellent.
—
## ROUND NINE – Left wins
**Left:**
Evening moonlit night – a frog that dries its body on the ridge, kana. – Kinpū
**Right:**
A leaping frog – a cat gives chase deep in the fields. – Suiyū
The frog drying its body is well suited to the evening moonlight. The frog on the right – perhaps this refers to a common style of accompanying verses (*tsuke* ) at the time. Although it is set in the depths of the fields, one might say it is too deliberately sought-after as a famous place. To bring up a scene of tranquil solitude, perhaps the verse lacks a certain poetic grounding. If one simply takes the strength or weakness of the conception, the left must win.
—
## ROUND TEN – Right wins
**Left:**
Even the sound of dripping eaves – wearies the frog, kana. – Tonan
**Right:**
How plaintive – the tadpole follows the bamboo water pipe, kana. – Kifū
If one could hear in it something like *”The sparse rain on half the eaves serves as a medium for sorrow; the croaking frog speaks with the recluse”* , it would be a fine conceit. But the verse is too cramped, and the words seem inadequate. The phrasing that flows from the five characters for “tadpole” (*kaeru ko* ) – does it follow the style of Jichin and Saigyō? The form is respectful and restrained, so the right is judged the winner.
—
## ROUND ELEVEN – Right wins
**Left:**
The leaping frog – envies the heron in its heart, kana. – Zenpō
**Right:**
Hidden in the algae – the frog peers into the floating world, kana. – Rusui
The heron comes and stands by the quiet pond. The frog asks: *”You stand on one leg, still and sleeping among the cold reeds – are you happy?”* The heron replies: *”I do not need to boast of my purity to others. I merely have a heart that envies the fish.”* In this contest, does this refer to a person at leisure yet vexed in spirit? The frog hidden in the algae does not give a direct answer, but its perspective is by no means inferior.
—
## ROUND TWELVE – Left: tie
**Left:**
A frog that travels with dust on its sleeves – how pointless. – Ransetsu
**Right:**
Deep in the bamboo – is there any benefit in raising a frog? – Haryū
Left: “How pointless.” Right: “Is there any benefit?” – a tie.
—
## ROUND THIRTEEN – Left: tie
**Left:**
Swaying, swaying – a frog is swayed by the willow, kana. – Hokon
**Right:**
Reaching out a hand – a frog climbs the willow, kana. – Kosai
Two willow trees bend toward each other, their green hues hard to distinguish. As for the frog in the first tree: reaching out a hand to the flowering branch-tip, it borrows a phrase from an old poem, gazes at the distant treetop, and seems about to climb but has not yet done so – this is touching and plaintive. As for the frog on the left: having climbed the tree, it sways in the wind and seems about to fall – one might compare it to the hail on the bamboo or the dew on the bush clover. If one were to force a judgement between the two, it would not be without distinction depending on taste and preference. Yet as an ornament to this scroll, in the manner of ancient and modern poetry, let the brush be laid down just as it is, and let future readers judge according to their own hearts.
—
## ROUND FOURTEEN – Left: tie
**Left:**
Spreading its hands – a frog that floats and dozes on the water, kana. – Chiri
**Right:**
In the daytime, without dew – a frog croaks among the mugwort. – Santen
The frog that dozes afloat, pillowed on the current – does it correct the error of Son Chu’s argument? The heart of the frog beneath the mugwort is also cramped in its verse. Both left and right are difficult to decide between.
—
## ROUND FIFTEEN – Right wins
**Left:**
Abandoning its raincoat – a frog lodges in the droplets, kana. – Tachisuke
**Right:**
Among young reeds – a frog bends down the flowing stream, kana. – Bashizu
Left: it sounds like a plausible composition. If it were to lodge in a hermitage drying dew, it would be an imposing image – but the character for “abandon” (*suteru* ) seems somewhat weak in spirit. Right: a frog that stoops along with the flow – the words are gentle and pliant. It should be the winner.
—
## ROUND SIXTEEN – Right wins
**Left:**
Crawling out – a frog rubs its back against the grass, kana. – Kyohaku
**Right:**
On the duckweed – a frog plays with its child, kana. – Kashiku
The frog that rubs its back against the grass is not without interest, but the parent frog playing with its child – though not a fish, does it know that joy? The young moorhen sleeps beside its mother; the swallow chick and the feeding crow are scenes of their own delight. Beyond mere refinement, there is genuine substance here – it is decidedly superior.
—
## ROUND SEVENTEEN – Left wins
**Left:**
A frog that hoists up falling blossoms, kana. – Sūha
**Right:**
Morning grass – a frog attached to a horse, kana. – Ranchiku
The frog on the pond’s edge chasing the flying petals – is this not a fitting sight for a man of leisure? The frog mown down with the morning grass, its whereabouts unknown – how many cries will it make? This, too, is hard to discard.
—
## ROUND EIGHTEEN – Left: tie
**Left:**
Mountain well – a frog draws water at the ink-sleeve, kana. – Sampū
**Right:**
Its tail has fallen – and it cannot yet cry, the frog, kana. – Kashi
The frog of the mountain well, drawn at the ink-sleeve – the words are profound and deeply plaintive. The figure of the monk drawing water, the setting of the mountain well, the stance of rocks – all are not without a chill. A wisteria with no flowers, small, hanging over the pine and shading the clear water – one can almost see it all. This is a place where the heart overflows beyond the words. On the right: the sunlight is warm, the water of the small paddies tepid, the watercress and shepherd’s purse are growing tall, butterflies flit about, and the tadpoles have grown somewhat larger. For its seasonable and fitting atmosphere, it is judged a tie.
—
## ROUND NINETEEN – Left wins
**Left:**
Leaving the moat – a frog that spends its time waiting for people, kana. – Bokutaku
**Right:**
Even if caught – a frog that is not interesting, kana. – Kyōsui
For this round, both the judges and the scribe were weary of the long spring day and lost themselves in reverie. Therefore, the judgement is unclear. The left should win.
—
## ROUND TWENTY
**Left:**
When feeling low – even the distant croak of the toad in the rainy night, kana. – Sora
**Right:**
Here and there – frogs croak, numerous as the stars on the river, kana. – Kikaku
When it begins with “when feeling low” – the toad’s distant drone disturbs the grass-thatched hut; the night rain adds tears and deepens the pathos. With just a few characters, it exhausts boundless emotion – this is the very essence of this art. On the right: it is past the twentieth day of the second month; the riverside is moonless, the wind still cold, and the starlight flickers. Frogs begin to croak in voices here and there – it is elegant, yet eerie. *”Green grass, a pond here and there, frogs everywhere – the appointed hour did not come, and midnight passed”* – such an atmosphere is preserved just as it is. What one sees and what one feels – it is as if another pair has been added to the top of a nine-storied pagoda.
—
## ADDITIONAL VERSE
Around the time of his pilgrimage to Kashima, at the Tsugihashi bridge in Mama:
> The Tsugihashi bridge – with a knowing look, a flying frog. – Fuhoku
—
**Colophon (by Senka):**
Gathered recently at the Bashō-an in Fukagawa, we held a session of frog verses. With the collective judgement (*shūgi-han*) on the croaking of the assembled frogs, I, Senka of the Seisen-dō, have hastily wielded my worn brush and selected these verses.
*Jōkyō 3, Year of the Tiger, intercalary third month.*
*Nishimura Baifūken, Shinkawagaya-chō.*
—
**Notes on “Collective Judgement” (*shūgi-han*):**
① To decide on优劣, good or bad, adoption or rejection, etc., by consultation.
*Example from Ukiyo-zōshi ‘Kōshoku Haidokusan’ (1703):* “Since this is the first meeting today, the women’s capriciousness is repeated, and it shall be decided by collective judgement.”
② In a poetry match, the left and right participants each judge the relative merits of the verses. Also, that method.
*Example from ‘Minamoto no Ienaga Nikki’ (c. 1216–21):* “At this poetry match in the Waka Hall, when this verse was read aloud, His Majesty repeatedly intoned it, expressing that it was well composed.”
*(Source: Seisenban Nihon Kokugo Daijiten)*
—
**Source Reference:**
http://base1.nijl.ac.jp/iview/Frame.jsp?DB_ID=G0003917KTM&C_CODE=0002-001204
—
**Image:** *Frog Match (Senka Edition)* – held at the University of Tokyo Library (frame 3/21).
—
**Postscript:**
The year Jōkyō 3 (1686), when the *Frog Match (Senka Edition)* was completed, was the year Bashō turned forty-three. This “Twentieth Round Verse Match” on the theme of frogs (totalling forty verses in twenty pairs, plus one additional verse, making forty-one) includes judgements and features a distinguished gathering of poets including Senka, Sodō, Kikaku, Ransetsu, Sampū, Kyorai, Rantsū, Bunrin, Koya, Dakushi, Haryū, and others.
According to Senka’s colophon, this was a “collective judgement” (*shūgi-han*). However, having so many poets gathered in one place for a collective judgement was unprecedented. In reality, it is likely that not all the listed poets were present at the Bashō-an; perhaps the actual attendees were “the host Bashō, his friend Sodō, Kikaku who wrote the underside, and the compiler Senka” (*Genroku Haikai Shu*, Iwanami Shoten). Thus, it should not be interpreted as a judgement by the entire group of poets listed.
Furthermore, Bashō’s verse “Old pond – a frog leaps in, sound of water” was not composed in Jōkyō 3 (1686), the year of this *Frog Match*, but earlier, in Tenna 2 (1682), when Bashō was thirty-nine. This interpretation (found in *Bashō-shū (Complete)* – *Classical Haibungaku Taikei 5*) seems plausible, also considering its inclusion in *Haru no Hi* (edited by Kakei), which was compiled in the same year as the *Frog Match (Senka Edition)*.
—
**End of translation.**
—
Terrific, Henk: thank you!
Which AI was this, as a matter of interest?
Ai was deepseek complete copy of the text from the first link.
“In 1806, the court bestowed on him the title of Hion Myojin, literally ‘Jumping Frog Bright Deity,’ alluding to Basho’s haiku on the frog that jumped into the old pond. In 1885 the government recognized the ‘Old Pond Church’ (Furuike Kyokai) as a religious body affiliated with the Basho sect of Shinto.”
—Donald Keene, The Winter Sun Shines In
Beats a Touchstone Award, even!
But the idolatry of Basho-worshippers came to repel Shiki…of whom, more anon…
So modest
the famous
frog
(unpublished)
And so we fall into the pond as if into a swamp. The frog holds us with its small but strong paws. The more we struggle, the deeper we sink. Others stand around, interpreting our descent and offering advice, but no one offers any helpful equipment.
The deeper we sink, the less we want to get out. We begin to feel good. Lifelong analysis is fascinating. Those standing around begin to regret not jumping in, but they can still do it. There’s enough room for everyone. The frog swims away, we freeze, but we still hear the splash, or maybe the splash hears us? Never mind. We stop analyzing altogether. We begin to be analyzed. By our own brain?
I love this! :)
Yes, old pond is oddly trap-like—not because it withholds meaning, but because it contains so much of it. It lures you in with its apparent simplicity, then quietly refuses to let you go. The deeper you look, the less likely you are to arrive at a final meaning—and, strangely, the less you want to.
It is rather like quicksand, or perhaps a kaleidoscope: every turn reveals a new pattern, none of which exhausts the poem. The poem becomes less something you solve than somewhere you dwell, and the fascination isn’t in reaching the bottom, but in discovering there doesn’t seem to be one.
Keith quoted Zhuangzi last week, where he says we see ourselves only in still water. Old pond makes me wonder whether that’s only the beginning. Perhaps we first see ourselves in still water, but we only begin to discover ourselves once the water is disturbed. The splash doesn’t destroy the reflection; it sets it in motion, and with it our thinking.
I love kaleidoscopes and your analyses. I feel similarly about this topic. I once had a handmade kaleidoscope. I still feel that thrill of fascination. I also believe that our true, not the showy, side can only be revealed in turbulent waters.
I hope that, without breaking away from the trap of the pond, we will later begin analyzing another iconic poem.
Urszula — thank you, what a beautiful image, a handmade kaleidoscope. There will be many more poems, I hope, of all kinds. Each one its own journey.:)
So much beauty in the world, so little time to discover it. But why bother with everything? A little beauty is enough.
17 syllables instead of an epic.
One splash instead of a sea of sound.
More on dates and purposes:
Kawazu Awase (蛙合, “frog contest”) was a haikai contest-book compiled and edited by Bashō’s disciple Senka. It follows the old courtly uta-awase format of poetry matching, a competitive literary game and courtly entertainment that originated during the late 9th century. Hokku on the set topic of frog were paired off, left against right, and judged. There were 20-24 rounds (sources differ) containing 40 paired verses plus one over. Bashō’s “old pond” poem was given the top left position, the place of honour. Judging was by group discussion, Senka assumed to be presiding. Round one paired Bashō’s old pond against Senka’s poem “いたいけに蝦つくばふ浮葉哉 “tenderly the frog crouches on a floating leaf” on the right. The judges’ note appended to that pairing doesn’t explicitly rank them.
No contest, I’d say!
Modern commentators read the entire collection as effectively staged around old pond but the editor’s comment doesn’t make clear whether the verse was composed for the contest, or had been composed earlier. Scholars disagree over it.
The most-cited compositional story is by Bashō’s acolyte Kagami Shikō in Kuzu no Matsubara, 1692. According to Shikō, Bashō already had the lines “kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto” and was undecided on the opening part. Kikaku proposed yamabuki ya (yellow kerria), based on an old waka convention pairing frogs with kerria blossoms. Bashō rejected this and settled on “furuike ya” instead, reportedly saying that the kerria’s five syllables were elegant and showy in the courtly tradition, whereas “old pond” was plain and true. Choosing the humble phrase over the conventionally beautiful one was indicated.
I might also add, that with kawazu (spring kigo) and yamabuki (late spring kigo) Basho would have had two kigo in the same verse. One other reason to wag a finger at Kikaku, maybe (“old pond” is/was not a kigo, of course).
Shikō’s account places the composition at “the beginning of the Tenna era,” when Bashō had just occupied his Fukagawa hut and adopted the name Bashō, four or five years before the Frog Contest. But because haikai verses intended for publication were normally entered into an anthology very soon after being composed, the established scholarly view treats 1686, the same year as the contest, as the poem’s actual year of composition. Modern reference works hedge.
Kawazu Awase was published in spring 1686, and the old pond poem was included in Haru no Hi (A Day in Spring), one of seven anthologies by Bashõ’s Shomon school, a few months later. So there isn’t an indisputable date of composition.
Nor is there an indication it was used for a renga. But it was of course normal to compose hokku for renga as well as for hokku contests and, for that matter, by Basho as free-standing verses for haibun. It’s anybody’s guess.
Keith — thank you, wonderful context. One small pushback on the kigo point: haiku with two kigo aren’t that uncommon, so I’m not sure that alone counts against yamabuki ya. I’d guess it’s more a question of how compatible the two kigo and their hon’i actually are — though that’s an empirical guess on my part, I haven’t actually read anything specifically on the topic. :)
That’s true, Orense. There are verses with two or more kigo; but there has usually to be a good reason, quite often from a real observation. Concerning this one (yellow kerria) it seems the most likely reason Kikaku suggested it was that several verses going back to the Man’yōshū and Kokinshū link kawazu and kerria at a specific place-name, Ide no Tamagawa where frogs were said to cry among the kerria blossoms along the riverbank: “frogs cry, and the kerria blossoms of Ide have scattered, just when I wished I could have seen them in full bloom,” anonymous poem around 900. Which seems hardly likely to recommend it to Bashõ as revolutionary and likely to flout courtly tradition in favour of the everyday.
A post that is scheduled to appear in August deals briefly with multiple kigo in response to a question from a M&F reader. Sodõ of course had a verse with three kigo and two semantic cuts, giving three separate elements. But then, the link between them, and the revelation, was that they were all the joys of spring, one for the eyes, one for the ears, and one for the tastebuds. See https://thehaikufoundation.org/yamaguchi-sodo/
As a matter of interest, can you think off-hand of a verse by Bashõ himself with two kigo? I expect there is one, but I can’t recall one off the top of my head… it could be useful….
PS Yes:
uguisu no / kasa otoshitaru / tsubaki kana
—Bashō 1689
the bush warbler / drops his hat / camellia
two spring kigo, cool as you like.
This came up in other reading almost as soon as I’d posted the comment. I expect there are more.
Thanks, Keith. The point about Kikaku is exactly what I had in mind. I allude to it in the essay when I say the scene would have been correctly arranged. Yamabuki and kawazu already belonged together within the inherited poetic tradition, and the pairing would have reinforced an established seasonal association.
Bashō, of course, isn’t opposed to literary reference or allusion — far from it. He draws on tradition constantly. But here yamabuki would have remained largely decorative and static, confirming what readers already expected rather than doing any new poetic work.
the bush warbler / drops his hat / camellia
You found a delightful example by Bashō. Buson also has quite a few with two kigo — I think of one of his haiga:
a little cuckoo across a hydrangea
Bird-and-flower pairings are common in both poetry and painting, drawing on the broader kachō (flowers-and-birds) aesthetic tradition — the two kigo completing rather than competing with each other within a recognised aesthetic unit. As is almost always the case in haiku, the one-kigo principle is more a guideline toward focus and unity than a rule. There are obvious practical problems with treating it as binding.
These examples show that what matters more is what the seasonal material is doing in the poem rather than how many items are present. I expect we will dive deeper into this topic soon.:)
Thank you Keith! for your highly informative article about the Kawazu Awase and the historical context of Bashō’s famous frog haiku. I found it particularly interesting to read about the format of the poetry contest and the place of honour that Bashō’s poem received.
It has made me curious about to the other 40 entries and how they relate to Bashō’s masterpiece. included?
It puts the haiku in a different light for me once again.
Thank you very much for the fascinating article.
Thank you, Henk.
I think a record of the document exists somewhere but haven’t been able to dig it out of Japan. Research is like pulling the endless loose thread of a sweater.
I do have one other verse said to be from it, again on the right hand side, and possibly also pitted against Basho’s frog. It is by Yamaguchi Sodõ:
雨の蛙声高になるも哀也
ame no kawazu koe takaku naru mo aware nari
in rain the frogs’ voices swell ((becoming louder)) ((or: the frog’s voice swells))
that too is touching ((poignant, has pathos))
I don’t have the verse it was paired with. But have to focus on other stuff right now.
https://yahan14.seesaa.net/article/2023-02-08.html
https://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/bunko31/bunko31_a0062/bunko31_a0062.pdf
Thanks, but the pdf’s too much for me! How about a translation, Simon?
The other link gets me “access forbidden”