旅に病んで 夢は枯野を かけ廻る tabi ni yande yume wa kareno wo kake meguru bashō 芭蕉 Taken ill on my travels, My dreams roam over the withered moors

Taken ill on my travels,
My dreams roam over
the withered moors ^[1]

旅に病んで夢は枯野をかけ廻る (tabi ni yande yume wa kareno wo kake meguru): ill on the road, and my dreams run round the withered fields.

Bashō's verse comes from a night of illness on a journey. A sick man cannot move, but his dreams can, and they range over the winter fields he spent his life walking. It was the last new verse he made, and it is often called his death poem. Read plainly, it tells only of that night, and its greatness is that it does not know it is the last.

In the Japanese, the small word は sets the dreams apart from the sick man lying still. 枯野, the withered fields, is the season word for winter. The Design style writes 枯野 as 枯の and spells the verb in kana, かけめぐる; the words are the same.

References:

^[1] After Asatarō Miyamori, An Anthology of Haiku Ancient and Modern (Maruzen, 1932), p. 218.

Bashō composed it at Osaka in the night of the eighth day of the tenth month of Genroku 7 (1694), four days before his death, as his disciples Takarai Kikaku and Kagami Shikō recorded within a year, Shikō adding that his attendant Donshū wrote it down.

We want you to be as happy with the meaning as you are with Master Takase's art. To learn more, visit Philology of 旅に病んで夢は枯野をかけ廻る.

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