旅に病んで夢は枯野をかけ廻る tabi ni yande yume wa kareno wo kake meguru Bashō - Taken ill on my travels, My dreams roam over the withered moors

Bashō's verse comes from a night of illness on a journey. A sick man cannot move, but his dreams can, and they range over the winter fields he spent his life walking. It was the last new verse he made, and it is often called his death poem. Read plainly, it tells only of that night, and its greatness is that it does not know it is the last.

In the Japanese, the small word は sets the dreams apart from the sick man lying still. 枯野, the withered fields, is the season word for winter. The Design style writes 枯野 as 枯の and spells the verb in kana, かけめぐる; the words are the same.

The English follows Asatarō Miyamori's, from his Anthology of Haiku of 1932.

Bashō composed it at Osaka in the night of the eighth day of the tenth month of Genroku 7 (1694), four days before his death, as his disciples Takarai Kikaku and Kagami Shikō recorded within a year, Shikō adding that his attendant Donshū wrote it down.

We want you to be as happy with the meaning as you are with Master Takase's art. To learn more, visit Philology of 旅に病んで夢は枯野をかけ廻る.

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