Haiku by Basho

In the plum blossom scent,
the sun pops out,
a mountain path

梅が香にのつと日の出る山路かな (mume ga ka ni notto hi no deru yamaji kana): in the scent of plum, all at once the sun comes up; a mountain path. 梅が香 is the scent of plum, the early-spring season word, and mume is the first printing's own spelling of ume; に marks where the scent is, so the sun comes up where the scent is and not because of it; のつと, notto, is suddenly, with a lurch, a colloquial word with a round warm sound; 日の出る山路 is the mountain path where the sun comes up, and かな the exclamation. It is the opening verse of a linked sequence Bashō composed with his disciple Yaba in Edo in the early spring of 1694, the year he died, printed that summer in the anthology 炭俵, Charcoal Sack; Yaba's answering verse has pheasants crying as they fly up. Readers since have made it the standard example of the lightness, karumi, of his last style, and Blyth heard the poet smell the sun. The English is Timothy L. Jackowski's, made for Takase Studios.

Plum blossoms are the harbinger of spring. In this poem, I can imagine that Basho is walking head down along a cold, misty mountain path. He smells the fragrance of the plum blossom and looks up and, suddenly, there is the sun. After a long winter, the fragrance of the plum blossoms contains all the promises of spring.

Calligraphy Notes:

1) The kanji 梅 is today read ume. In Basho's time, the reading was mume which we use here. This does not change the calligraphy, only how the poem is read.

2) This poem predates the modern introduction of the "small tsu" in hiragana. At the time the poem was written, the word and the context determined the pronunciation so today we write のっと (read notto) but the original poem wrote のつと (also read notto but written as notsuto). In these designs I have opted to use the modern form.

Taken together then, the modern reading of Basho's haiku is ume ga ka ni notto hi no deru yamaji kana.