It Is With Awe - Analysis

Awe aimed at the ordinary

The poem’s central claim is that awe can be triggered by the simplest, most common thing—if you truly look. Basho doesn’t point to a mountain or a storm; he points to “fresh leaves, green leaves,” made “bright in the sun.” The tone is quietly reverent, almost devotional, but it’s devotion without a church: the holiness arrives through attention. The opening phrase, “It is with awe,” sets the emotional pitch immediately, and what follows is a steady narrowing of focus from the speaker’s feeling (“I beheld”) to the plain facts of color and light.

“Fresh” and “bright”: a moment that can’t be kept

The key image is the leaves themselves, but the poem insists on their immediacy: “fresh” suggests newness, and “bright” suggests a particular instant of sunlight striking them. There’s a gentle tension here between what the speaker experiences and how quickly it must pass. Leaves will dull; sunlight shifts; freshness fades. Yet the poem refuses to mourn or preach—it simply records a moment when the world becomes suddenly vivid. The small turn happens as the speaker’s “awe” is justified not by explanation but by description: the feeling doesn’t lead to a lesson, it leads to seeing. In that sense, the poem asks us to accept a contradiction: that something so everyday can feel immense, and that the only way to meet that immensity is through a brief, ungraspable “beheld” moment.