春の海終日のたりのたり哉 haru no umi hinemosu notari notari kana Buson - The spring sea, all day rising and falling, rising and falling

春の海終日のたりのたり哉 (haru no umi hinemosu notari notari kana): the spring sea, all day long, swelling and falling, swelling and falling. 春の海 is the spring sea, a calm open surface; 終日, hinemosu, is all day long; のたりのたり is a word for the slow heave of a swell, and the great dictionary of 1919 defines it from this verse; 哉 closes it. The doubling is the poem: the word takes as long to say as a swell takes to pass, and 終日 says it will not stop. The verse was first printed in 1763 in an anthology whose editor judged it plain, calm and free, and in 1797 it was inscribed, with Buson's name, in the sky of a printed view of Edo bay. Every reader since has praised two things in it, its plainness and its sound. The motion is a swell in place, the sea heaving slowly all day. The English follows Haruo Shirane's, from The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature of 2016.