Morning And Evening - Analysis

Beauty that doesn’t answer back

Bashō’s haiku takes a place famous for being overwhelming and makes it strangely private: a stage for unreturned feeling. The central claim is simple and cutting: even in a landscape celebrated for its splendor, the speaker’s attention keeps circling one fact—someone is waiting, and the waiting is “one-sided.” By setting the poem at Matsushima, a scenic bay long praised as one of Japan’s great views, Bashō sharpens the loneliness: the world can be gorgeous and still refuse to give you what you want.

“Morning and evening”: time as a kind of ache

The first phrase, “Morning and evening,” is both gentle and relentless. It suggests a full day’s cycle, repeated—an ordinary rhythm that becomes a measure of persistence. This isn’t a single moment of longing; it’s a routine, a habit of looking out again and again. The tone here is quiet and observant, but also tired: the speaker notices how longing has colonized time itself. The poem doesn’t describe what the person does while waiting; it only tells us that the waiting keeps happening, as regularly as dawn and dusk.

Waiting at Matsushima: a public landmark, a private fixation

“Someone waits at Matsushima!” lands with a small shock. The exclamation point tilts the line toward sudden recognition—almost as if the speaker has just spotted the figure, or just realized what the place means to them now. Matsushima carries the weight of travel and wonder (Bashō himself visited it on his journey recorded in The Narrow Road to the Deep North), yet the poem refuses the usual tourist gaze. Instead of islands, pines, and water, we get a single human posture: waiting. That creates a tension between the grandness of the setting and the narrowness of the emotional focus. The place is expansive; the feeling is stuck.

“One-sided love” as the poem’s hard verdict

The final line, “One-sided love,” reads like a diagnosis after two lines of observation. It’s also the poem’s turn from scene to meaning: the earlier images could be romantic, even hopeful, but this ending cancels the fantasy of mutuality. That cancellation creates the key contradiction: waiting implies expectation, yet “one-sided” implies there will be no answer. The speaker’s restraint makes the verdict colder; there’s no pleading, only naming.

If Matsushima is traditionally a place that “takes your breath away,” the poem suggests a harsher possibility: what if the landscape’s silence starts to resemble the beloved’s silence? The same stillness that makes a view sublime can, in a different mood, feel like refusal.