Matsuo Bashō, born Matsuo Kinsaku, then Matsuo Chūemon Munefusa

At a hermitage: A cool fall night--getting dinner, we peeled eggplants, cucumbers.

Autumn moonlight--a worm digs silently into the chestnut.

Awakened at midnight by the sound of the water jar cracking from the ice.

A bee staggers out of the peony.

Ballet in the air... Twin butterflies until, twice white they meet, they mate.

A caterpillar, this deep in fall--still not a butterfly.

Between our two lives there is also the life of the cherry blossom.

A cicada shell; it sang itself utterly away.

Bird of time ? in Kyoto, pining for Kyoto.

A cuckoo cries and through a thicket of bamboo the late moon shines.

Breaking the silence of an ancient pond, a frog jumped into water ? a deep resonance.

A field of cotton--as if the moon had flowered.

Bush warbler: shits on the rice cakes on the porch rail.

A man, infirm with age, slowly sucks a fish bone.

Bush-clover flowers ?they sway but do not drop their beads of dew.

Friends part
forever -- wild geese
lost in cloud.

The summer grasses:
of mighty warlords' visions
all that they have left.

On my travels, stricken—
my dreams over the dry land
go on roving.

There is nothing you can see that is not a flower; There is nothing you can think that is not the moon.

The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.

Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.

Learn about a pine tree from a pine tree, and about a bamboo plant from a bamboo plant.

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.

Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in so doing you must let go of your subjective preoccupation with yourself.... Your poetry arises by itself when you and the object become one.

Learn the rules well, and then forget them.