First Day Of Spring - Analysis

Spring begins, but the mind looks backward

Basho’s haiku makes a quiet, stubborn claim: even on a day that culturally promises renewal, the speaker’s attention can’t be commanded by the season. The poem opens on “First day of spring,” a phrase that should feel like a clean start, but the dash immediately undercuts that freshness. Instead of stepping forward, the speaker admits, “I keep thinking about” something else. The tone is calm and plainspoken, yet the calmness reads as a kind of resignation: the mind returns where it returns.

The “end of autumn” as a private weather

The surprise is what the speaker chooses to remember. Not winter, not hardship, but “the end of autumn”—a specific edge between warmth and loss, fullness and decline. Autumn’s ending carries a particular melancholy: leaves are not just gone; they are in the act of going. By placing that phrase on the final line, Basho makes it land like an aftertaste. Spring exists outside, but the speaker’s inner season is still that moment of fading.

A small contradiction that feels true

The poem’s tension is simple and sharp: beginnings don’t erase endings. The first day of spring should cancel autumn’s closing, yet the speaker “keep[s] thinking” of it, as if the calendar can’t compete with memory. That persistence suggests grief, nostalgia, or even a disciplined attentiveness to transience: the mind stays with what falls away, precisely when the world insists on what returns.