The storehouse burned, nothing now stands in the way of the moon kura yakete sawaru mono naki tsukimi kana 蔵焼けて さはるものなき 月見哉 masahide 正秀

Word for word: 蔵焼けて, the storehouse burned; さはるものなき, there is nothing in the way; 月見哉, the moon-viewing. 蔵 is a storehouse, a building for keeping goods. さはる, 障る, is to be in the way, a hindrance. 哉 is the cutting word, closing the verse with feeling, much as English says how …!

月見 is moon-viewing, above all on two nights of the old calendar: the fifteenth of the eighth month and the thirteenth of the ninth. It is a season word of autumn. Bashō used the same middle words, nothing in the way, of a hat on the open plain of Musashino.

As Masahide's pupil tells it, fire spread to Masahide's place at the start of the Genroku years, and he made this verse. In that telling, Bashō heard of it in his hut at Fukagawa, clapped his hands and said he longed to know its author. So, the pupil writes, their letters began.

In the 『三冊子』, Hattori Dohō's record of Bashō's teaching, Bashō's year-end verse says poetry too is in its December. Dohō writes that it speaks as one with the common, 俗, and that this is the late master's heart. Beside it he sets two verses of others, one opening 蔵やけて and one on a butterfly's noisy wings.

In the two prints our history read, the 『三冊子』 cites the verse beginning 蔵やけて by that opening and no more. A book of sayings of Bashō's school, prefaced in 1774, repeats the 『三冊子』 passage with its two verses written out, still as someone's. In their 1966 edition of Bashō's collected works, the editors asked whether the 『三冊子』 means Masahide's verse, noting that 『水の友』 has Bashō praising it.

Whether Masahide served the Zeze domain or was a townsman is disputed, and the dictionaries differ. A study of 1984 leans to a well-to-do townsman.

In English the storehouse changed shape. Asatarō Miyamori kept it, in his book of 1932: My storehouse having been burnt down, / Nothing obstructs the view of the bright moon. Harry Behn made it a house, with a rising moon, in Haiku Harvest of 1962. Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto made it a barn in their book of 1977; no earlier Barn's burnt down was found in the Internet Archive's full-text index. Later books of inspiration print the barn line. The house, the rising moon and the barn are the translators'; the Japanese has a storehouse and the moon-viewing.

Our history reads the moon as the verse's subject and the fire as its occasion. The words say nothing of the poet's loss or his calm; the calm is in the tellings around the verse. In our history's words, it is a moon-viewing verse that finds a clear sky in a ruin.

In our history's hearing, the 『三冊子』 objects to a poet who has lost his goods and says he has gained the moon. In that hearing, such a poet stands above the loss. But the 『三冊子』 judged a verse it named by its opening, together with a second verse. The turn it hears as lofty is quieter in the words than in the story.

Our history takes the verse as the Bashō of 『水の友』 takes it: a verse of what loss leaves open. It holds beside that reading that a teacher in Bashō's own school heard the verse as a pose.

A hokku by Mizuta Masahide 水田正秀 (1657–1723) of Zeze, a pupil of Bashō, first found whole in the memorial collection his pupil published the year after his death (1724), where Bashō, hearing it, praises it as the soul of poetry; an older teaching of Bashō's school, composed about 1702–03, cites a verse with the same opening words, naming no author, as lofty in the saying and vulgar at heart.