Buson - To white plum blossoms, Each night just dawning, Evermore

白梅に明る夜ばかりとなりにけり (shiraume ni akuru yo bakari to nari ni keri): white plum blossoms, and nights that now do nothing but dawn on them. 白梅 is the white plum, the first flower of the year and a word for early spring; 明る夜 is the night that dawns; ばかり is *only, nothing but*; となりにけり, *it has come to this*, is the old perfect with its weight of realization. It is the last verse Buson made. His disciple Kitō's account of the master's last night, the twenty-fourth of the twelfth month of Tenmei 3, has him calm and speaking as he always had, calling for a brush and dictating from his bed: two verses on a bush warbler, a pause, and then this one, with the instruction that it be headed *early spring*, a season he would not see. He died toward dawn on 25 January 1784, aged sixty-eight. Gekkei, who took the verse down, wrote that the master finished it and closed his eyes. Blyth read it as a verse with no further meaning: every day now, the dawn comes from the direction of the white plum. On two of the designs Master Takase brushes しら梅 in kana, as the 1784 print does. The English is Timothy L. Jackowski's, made for Takase Studios.