池と川 ひとつになりぬ 春の雨 ike to kawa hitotsu ni narinu haru no ame buson 蕪村 In the spring rain The pond and the river Have become one

In the spring rain
The pond and the river
Have become one

池と川ひとつになりぬ春の雨 (ike to kawa hitotsu ni narinu haru no ame): the pond and the stream have become one; spring rain. 池と川 is a pond and a stream; ひとつになりぬ is have become one, with ぬ marking a thing quietly finished; 春の雨 is the spring rain, the soft continuous rain of the season, where the summer rains are the ones that flood rivers. On 20 July 1903 three men of Shiki's circle read it together and argued whether two waters joining can be spring rain at all. Hekigotō heard a flood, and Kyoshi a field brook and a little garden pond. A year later the critic Satō Kōroku answered it: the season word governs, and the joining is soft. The English is R. H. Blyth's, from his Haiku of 1952.

The verse is Buson's, first printed in 1900 in Mizuochi Roseki 水落露石's 蕪村遺稿, a gathering from a manuscript of the verses his 1784 selection had left out; Stephen Addiss, following the 1992 Kōdansha complete works, dates it to 1782.

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Eri Takase was born and raised in Osaka, Japan, and holds the rank of Shihan, the highest rank in Japanese calligraphy, from the Bokuteki-kai and the Bunka-shodo. About Master Takase