How Admirable - Analysis

Admiration for a Mind That Refuses the Obvious Lesson

Bashō’s three lines revolve around a small but startling reversal: lightning, the classic image of suddenness, does not trigger a meditation on impermanence. The speaker opens with the emphatic “How admirable!” and then names the admirable act: “to see lightning and not think” that “life is fleeting.” The central claim the poem quietly makes is that there is a kind of wisdom in not converting every vivid experience into a lesson. Instead of praising insight into transience, it praises restraint from that insight—at least in that moment.

Lightning: An Invitation to Sentiment, and a Refusal

Lightning arrives as a ready-made symbol: instant brightness, instant disappearance. Many readers (and many poems) would treat it as a prompt to say, yes, everything vanishes; therefore cherish, or mourn. Bashō points directly at that habitual move by phrasing it as “not think” rather than “not know.” The person being admired is not ignorant of mortality; they simply do not let lightning automatically become an emblem. That creates the poem’s key tension: lightning practically begs for a “life is fleeting” conclusion, yet the poem applauds the mind that doesn’t reach for it.

Two Readings: Zen-like Presence or Humanly Stubborn Denial

On one reading, the admiration is spiritual: to see lightning and remain with lightning, without piling on commentary, is a kind of disciplined attention. The exclamation “How admirable!” then sounds like praise for presence—being awake to the flash without turning it into self-drama. On another reading, the admiration has an edge: perhaps the speaker envies someone who can look at lightning and not feel the stab of “life is fleeting.” In that case, the poem becomes a tiny portrait of emotional self-protection, a person insulated from the melancholy that the world’s sudden beauty can provoke.

The Poem’s Small Turn from Awe to Self-Interrogation

The tonal turn happens between the pure exclamation and the oddly specific description that follows. “How admirable!” begins as awe, but the rest of the poem makes us ask: admirable to whom, and why? If lightning normally triggers a memento mori, then the speaker is confessing their own reflex: they do think “life is fleeting” when lightning appears. The admiration, then, contains a quiet self-portrait: a mind that can’t help moralizing the flash, watching—almost wistfully—someone who can simply see.