梅が香にのっと日の出る山路かな mume ga ka ni notto hi no deru yamaji kana Bashō - In the plum blossom scent, the sun pops out, a mountain path

Matsuo Bashō's verse is a walk at dawn in the cold of early spring. The scent of plum is in the air, and then the sun is suddenly there. It does not rise because of the scent but where the scent is, and the path under the walker's feet comes last. A disciple read the morning sun as winter's last cold, and Bashō said that was very good. Readers have called the verse light and plain, and some say the poet smelled the sun.

In the Japanese, のっと, notto, is suddenly, with a lurch, a common spoken word with a round, warm sound. 梅が香, the scent of plum, is the season word for early spring, and かな closes the verse in wonder.

The English follows Haruo Shirane's, from his Early Modern Japanese Literature of 2002.

Plum blossoms are the harbinger of spring. In this poem, I can imagine that Bashō is walking head down along a cold, misty mountain path. He smells the fragrance of the plum blossom and looks up and, suddenly, there is the sun. After a long winter, the fragrance of the plum blossoms contains all the promises of spring.

The verse is the hokku of a two-poet sequence Bashō composed with his disciple 野坡 in Edo in the early spring of 1694, published that summer in 炭俵 with 素龍's dated preface.

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