Haiku by Basho

The old pond,
a frog jumps in,
the sound of water

古池や蛙飛込水の音 (furu ike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto): the old pond; a frog leaps in: the sound of the water. や sets the pond down as a thing in itself before anything happens in it; 蛙, kawazu, is the classical word for the frog and a spring season word; 飛込 is to leap in, written here without its kana, as a commentator of 1783 wrote it; 水の音 is the sound the verse ends on. It dates from the spring of 1686, when Bashō set it on the left of the first round of a frog contest among forty-one poets, against a frog on a floating leaf. The story that a Zen master's question produced it is a legend two generations younger than the poem; the better story, carried in the haikai record, is that the disciple Kikaku wanted the first line to be yellow roses, the pretty association every reader expected, and Bashō chose an old pond. Everyone since 1783 has said the same of it: the sound is the water's, the leap is the frog's, the place is the pond, and that is the poem. The English follows R. H. Blyth's.

Calligraphy Notes:

1) Note that we have used the shorted version of tobikomu, the full form is 飛び込む (read tobikomu) meaning "to jump in; to leap in; to plunge into; to dive in".