Buson - Plum blossoms everywhere, I should go south, I should go north

梅遠近南すべく北すべく (ume ochikochi minami subeku kita subeku): plum blossoms here and there; south would do, and north would do. 遠近, ochikochi, is far and near, here and there; 南すべく and 北すべく are to go south and to go north, each with べく, would do, may, and nothing after them, so the sentence stops in the air. It stands in Buson's own collection of 1784 among the plum verses, with no headnote and no date, and within fifteen years a Kyoto gazetteer had attached it to a plum-viewing valley near Fushimi. A school rhetoric of 1935 made it the textbook case of the unsaid close and supplied what is left out, either way, as the heart pleases; Blyth called the feeling nameless and read it the same way, anywhere will do in these days of renewed life. Plum everywhere, so both roads are good: the verse is not a choice but a spring in which any direction is right. The English is Timothy L. Jackowski's, made for Takase Studios.