古池や蛙飛込水の音 furu ike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto Bashō - The old pond, a frog jumps in, the sound of water

古池や蛙飛込水の音 is a verse of one sound. An old pond lies still. A frog goes in, and the poem ends on the water's sound. や sets the pond down on its own before anything happens in it. 蛙, kawazu, is the older word for a frog and marks the spring, and 飛込, to leap in, is written here without its kana ending. Readers have long said the same of it: the sound is the water's, the leap is the frog's, and the place is the pond.

The English follows R. H. Blyth's, from his Haiku of 1949.

The verse was first printed in the spring of 1686 at the head of 蛙合, a contest of frog verses among Bashō's circle, set against Senka 仙化's frog on a floating leaf in the first round; the contest's note on that round says the whole book grew from those two frogs.

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