Basho - Taken ill on my travels, My dreams roam over the withered moors

旅に病んで夢は枯野をかけ廻る (tabi ni yande yume wa kareno wo kake meguru): ill on the road, and my dreams run round the withered fields. 旅に病んで is fallen ill on a journey; 夢は sets the dreams against the body that cannot move; 枯野 is the withered fields, the winter season word; かけ廻る is to run about, to range. It is the last verse Bashō composed. His disciples recorded that on the eighth night of the tenth month of 1694, unable to sleep, he composed it and had it written down, offered them a second form of the last phrase, and refused to call it a death verse: not a death verse, nor not one; the mind of my illness. He died four days later. The Japanese tradition argued for two centuries over what to call it; the English tradition made it his death verse because it needed one. The English is Asatarō Miyamori's, from his Anthology of Haiku of 1932.