Haikus are a different way of seeing things, a microcosm of a larger idea, of an emotion or feeling, a postage stamp or a postcard that takes us on a journey by night or day.

We are not leaving Matsuo Basho for good, we are merely taking a sojourn to a hillside in England where the poet William Wordsworth wandered over the hills of Grasmere with his fellow poet, Samuel Coleridge. I have restructured Wordsworth’s famous poem in set of three lines similar to a haiku renga.

From Odes on Intimations of Immortality:

By night or day,
The things which I have seen
I now can see no more…

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us,
our life’s Star, …

Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Not in entire forgetfulness,
          And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come …

Shades of the prison-house
begin to close
    Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light,
and whence it flows,
  He sees it in his joy …

William Wordsworth, Odes on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, 1804

It was a customary practice of Japanese monks, Samurai, and poets to write a poem at the moment of their death. In late fall of 1694, Basho suffered his final illness. Although he did not use the word “dying,” I have included it as this is considered his death poem. Tabi ni yume wa, literally, on a trip, and falling ill. A dream, an incorporeal body, wandering a withered field is a reference to the Noh plays popular in Edo when Basho arrived there as a young man.

旅に病んで　夢は枯野を　かけ廻る
tabi ni yande yume wa kareno wo kakemeguru

Sick and dying on my journey
my dreams ever wandering
on this withered field

Matsuo Basho, Death Haiku, 1694