Four Haiku - Analysis

One year, four kinds of seeing

These four haiku don’t just mark the seasons; they stage a series of lessons in attention. Across spring and autumn, Bashō keeps returning to moments where the world seems to lose its usual labels and boundaries, and the mind is asked to accept that blur without forcing it into certainty. The poems move from gentle concealment to sudden shock, and the central claim that emerges is this: the most truthful way to meet nature is to notice how it refuses to stay fixed—in name, in color, even in sound.

Spring’s nameless hill: beauty without possession

In “Spring,” the “hill without a name” is already an argument against owning the landscape through language. The hill exists, but it is not pinned down by a title, a map, or a personal history. The “morning mist” does more than decorate the scene; it “veils” it, making the hill partially unknowable. The tone is quiet and receptive, almost devotional: the speaker doesn’t try to pierce the mist or supply the missing name. Instead, the poem asks us to accept that the world can be present and withheld at the same time.

Autumn begins: when difference collapses into one green

The second haiku, “The beginning of autumn,” turns from veiling to merging. “Sea and emerald paddy” should be distinct—one saltwater and moving, the other cultivated and gridded—but they are “both the same green.” That sameness can feel calm, even consoling, but it also carries a quiet disorientation: if sea and field match, then the usual categories of wild and human-made start to wobble. The phrase “beginning of autumn” matters because it signals a threshold moment when change is real but not yet visible as change; summer’s color lingers even as the season turns underneath it.

Autumn winds: change arrives, yet the world stays green

In the third haiku, the poem lets contradiction stand in the open. “The winds of autumn / Blow,” and wind is an unmistakable messenger of the new season—sharp, drying, insistent. Yet “still green / The chestnut husks.” The line “yet still” holds the tension: the weather says autumn, the plants say not yet. Even the chestnut husks, which hint at ripening and eventual brown, are caught in an in-between state. The tone here is slightly more restless than before, because the speaker is now watching two truths coexist: the season has changed, but the color has not.

Lightning and the heron: a cry swallowed by darkness

The final haiku breaks the slow drift of observation with a jolt: “A flash of lightning.” What was gradual in the earlier poems becomes instantaneous. And the flash doesn’t clarify the world; it reveals “gloom,” as if the light only makes the darkness more palpable. Into that gloom “goes the heron’s cry.” The heron is usually a figure of stillness and precision, but here it is sound, not sight, and even that sound seems to disappear—“goes” suggests motion away from us, or a vanishing. The mood turns stark and haunted: nature is no longer softly veiled or gently blended; it is briefly illuminated and then immediately lost again.

A hard question the poems won’t answer for you

If the hill is “without a name,” if sea and paddy become “the same green,” and if even a heron’s cry can slip “into the gloom,” what does it mean to say you have truly noticed something? Bashō keeps showing perception as contact plus loss: you see, but through mist; you distinguish, but the colors merge; you hear, but the sound recedes. The poems seem to suggest that attention isn’t mastery—it’s the willingness to stay with what won’t stay.

From mist to lightning: an arc of impermanence

Taken together, the four haiku trace a subtle arc: concealment in spring, resemblance at autumn’s start, tension in autumn wind, and finally a violent instant of light swallowed back into darkness. The recurrent “green” links the middle poems, but it also becomes a kind of illusion—proof that surfaces can remain steady while time moves on. By ending with lightning and a disappearing cry, Bashō leaves us with a last, unsentimental insight: the natural world is not a backdrop to be described once and for all, but a sequence of fleeting encounters, each one true precisely because it cannot be held.