None Is Travelling - Analysis

A road where solitude becomes a companion

The opening scene, “None is travelling / Here along this way but I,” sets the collection’s central stance: the speaker is alone, but his loneliness is not merely personal; it’s a way of registering the world more sharply. The “autumn evening” matters because it’s already a season of thinning out, when light drains and roads empty. The voice sounds plain and almost reportorial, yet the simplicity is a kind of pressure: if no one else is here, then every small sound and change in light has to carry meaning. The poems keep returning to that condition, as if solitude were both wound and instrument.

New Year, same dusk: time does not rescue the self

The second piece deepens the tension by placing “The first day of the year” next to “loneliness,” and then, unexpectedly, back to “autumn dusk.” New Year should imply a clean break, but the poem refuses that comfort. The mind generates “thoughts,” yet thought doesn’t liberate; it produces the feeling of being cut off. By looping the calendar forward and the season backward, the poem suggests that inner weather can override official time. The tone here is quietly bleak, not dramatic—loneliness arrives as naturally as dusk.

Sound as proof the world is still alive

Several of these scenes hinge on brief, sharp sounds that puncture stillness. “An old pond” is nearly motionless until the frog’s jump, and then the single “Splash!” is like a heartbeat returning to a quiet body. Likewise, “Lightening” flashes and the “Heron’s cry” “Stabs the darkness”—a violent verb that makes the night feel physical, something that can be wounded. These moments don’t solve loneliness; they answer it with evidence. Even if the speaker is alone on the road, the world is not empty. The contradiction is that the comfort arrives as a shock: a splash, a cry, a stab.

The moon is too much: mercy arrives as clouds

The moon poem makes a surprising claim: “Clouds come from time to time” and give people “a chance to rest / from looking at the moon.” The moon is usually the emblem of calm beauty, but here it can become exhausting, even demanding. The poem treats beauty as something that can overwork the gaze, as if attention itself were a kind of labor. The clouds are not an obstruction; they are relief, a humane interruption. This subtly reframes the speaker’s solitude: being alone with the moon can be too intense, and the world provides its own soft limits.

Knowing death without prophecy: cicadas and the poor child

Impermanence becomes explicit in “In the cicada’s cry / There’s no sign” foretelling “How soon it must die.” The cicada’s sound is loud, insistent, full of life—yet it contains no warning label. The poem refuses a moralized nature that teaches us neat lessons; instead it gives us a creature singing into a future it cannot read. Beside that, the “Poverty’s child” grinding rice and then gazing at the moon brings human hardship into the same field of attention. The child’s work is gritty and immediate, yet the gaze lifts to something distant and cool. The tension is sharp: survival and contemplation in one body, one moment. The moon does not erase poverty, but it still claims the child’s eyes.

Inviting someone to see what cannot be shared

“Won’t you come and see / loneliness?” is the most direct address in the sequence, and it risks a paradox: loneliness is precisely what can’t be fully shared. Yet the poem offers “Just one leaf / from the kiri tree,” as if a single leaf could stand in for an entire feeling. The gesture is tender and slightly desperate: the speaker wants witness, but he can only offer a small token, not an explanation. That leaf becomes loneliness made portable—something you can hold, but not solve.

When bells fade and blossoms stay: a hard-earned “perfect evening”

The closing scene turns from sound to after-sound: “Temple bells die out” but “The fragrant blossoms remain.” What ends is the human-made marker of time, the bell’s authority; what continues is scent, the softer persistence of the natural world. Calling it “A perfect evening!” doesn’t feel naive, because perfection here includes vanishing. The poems have trained the reader to accept that the most reliable beauty is the kind that doesn’t last—and that the best consolation may be what lingers after the last note disappears.