遅き日のつもりて遠き昔かな osoki hi no tsumorite tōki mukashi kana Buson - The long slow days of spring, piling up, so far away the past

Yosa Buson's verse is about a spring day so long that it makes the years visible. The slow days pile up like snow, and the past feels very far away. The feeling is longing for the past, and readers have heard in it time that is felt rather than counted. Some hear bitterness in its sounds, and some hear a dream.

In the Japanese, 遅き日 is the long day of late spring, when the sun sets late; it is the season word. つもりて is piling up, said of days as of snow. One of the hands writes 昔, the past, in kana, as むかし.

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

The verse is Buson's, first printed in 1784 in his 蕪村句集 under the headnote 懐旧, longing for the past; the 1992 Kōdansha complete works dates it to 1775 from his own verse-book.

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