Shiki - Lifting up the hatchet, To cut it down, It was budding

Translation by R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume Four: Autumn-Winter (1952), Preface, page vii.

鉈あげてきらんとすれば木の芽かな (nata agete kiran to sureba konome kana): hatchet raised, about to cut, and there, the buds. 鉈 is the woodsman's short heavy blade; あげてきらんとすれば is raised it and was about to cut, when, the turn inside すれば that carries a discovery; 木の芽, konome, is the tree's buds, the spring season word; かな closes on the buds and holds the arrest. Shiki's editors printed it in 1925 among the verses of 1893, first under the heading 木の芽, and it is the buds that stop the hand. Blyth, in the preface to the last volume of his Haiku in 1952, gave it as the plainest case of the haiku poet's tenderness of mind, shown, he said, almost too distinctly. A small verse of a young man's spring: the cut is coming, the buds are seen only now, and the verse is the stop.