Nature in Japanese hokku Matsuo Basa


The great Japanese poet Matsuo Basse was born in the castle town of Ueno in the family of a poor Samurai.

The poet’s native city was in the province of Iga – in the very cradle of Japanese culture, in the center of the main island – Honshu. Many places in the homeland of Bass were known for their beauty, and the people’s memory preserved there in abundance songs, legends, ancient customs. From his childhood, Bashe began to write poetry. In his youth, he was tonsured as a monk, thus freeing himself from the service of the feudal lord. But he did not become a real monk. In wanderings, he passed along the roads of Japan, as the ambassador of poetry itself, lighting his people in love for her, introducing him to genuine art.

Bass raised the genre of folk poetry – hokku – to an unattainable height. The art of writing hockey is, first of all, the ability to say much in a little bit, to say so that to infect the reader with lyrical excitement,

to awaken his imagination. The main theme of the Triestisya Basa is nature. His triestosies, like magic binoculars, help to see the newly familiar pictures, realize the uniqueness and grandeur of the natural world – from the modest flower of the rape to the Milky Way. In three lines Bash was able to show the endless expanses of the Sea of ​​Japan, the brilliance of stars in a clear autumn night, the white breakers on the waves and the black silhouette of the island of Sado on the edge of the sky:

The sea is raging!
Away, to the island of Sado, the
Milky Way is steaming.

Bass suggests that we take a fresh look at the picture that we have seen, perhaps dozens of times:

Look carefully! You’ll see the
flowers of a shepherd’s bag
Under the fence.

All living things are unique and priceless. Beautiful not only many times sung cherry flowers, autumn beauties – chrysanthemums, but also a roadside vine, and wild ivy and raindrops, hung on fixed branches.

The nature of Basa lives its own unique life, but it is so similar to human life!

In hoccus “the birds weep, and the eyes of the fish are full of tears,” because the spring leaves, two stars celebrate their meeting, and the chilled monkey asks for a straw cloak, the seagull freezes, standing in cold water, and the flowers perform their “supreme feat” with unique flowering.

The poet is able to not only draw a poetic, lively picture, but also convey the essence of a natural phenomenon, to feel the mood of a tree, butterfly, bird, wind, autumn:

On a bare branch the
Crow sits alone.
Autumn evening.

It is difficult to imagine a more piercing picture of late autumn with its sadness, loneliness and black and white colors.

Reading poetry Bass, involuntarily agree with the poet that a person for happiness does not have much to do:

The lodge in solitude.
The moon… Chrysanthemums… In addition to them
A small field.

The lyrical hero of Bose’s poetry is an unassuming person, but wise and subtle. He is a poet and philosopher, in love with the nature of his native country. It is inseparable from its era and people. In every little hockey you can feel the breath of a huge world. In one of the tristeish Bass seems to address the hasty reader who first opened the book of hockey:

Do not think, with contempt:
“What a small seed!”
It’s red pepper.


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Nature in Japanese hokku Matsuo Basa