A Snowy Morning - Analysis

Snow as a world emptied out

The poem opens on “A snowy morning,” and that first image feels like a soft erasure. Snow muffles sound, smooths edges, covers tracks. Basho uses that blankness to set a mood of quiet reduction: the day has been pared down to what is directly in front of the speaker. The dash after “morning--” holds the reader in that hush a beat longer, as if the scene itself asks for silence before anything else can happen.

“By myself”: solitude without drama

Then the poem names its human condition plainly: “by myself,” set on its own line. There’s no complaint, no story, no explanation—just a fact placed beside the weather. That calmness is important: the tone isn’t tragic, but it is bare. The snow makes solitude feel natural, even inevitable, while the solitary line makes the speaker feel small inside the larger whiteness. The poem’s tension begins here: the world is spacious and clean, and yet the speaker is alone inside it.

Chewing dried salmon: the body interrupts beauty

The final line turns from landscape and mood to the mouth: “chewing on dried salmon.” It’s a startlingly physical detail after the airy snow. Chewing is slow, workmanlike, a little noisy; dried salmon is plain, salty, hard-won food. That contrast keeps the poem from becoming a postcard. The speaker isn’t “admiring” the snow; he is eating in it. The beauty of the morning and the necessity of hunger sit side by side, and neither cancels the other. If there’s humor, it’s the modest kind: the grand, wintry scene is met with the stubborn ordinariness of a person gnawing provisions.

What kind of loneliness tastes like this?

Dried food suggests storage, travel, endurance—life arranged around scarcity. So the poem’s quiet may not be leisure; it may be the quiet of someone keeping himself going. In that light, “by myself” becomes less a mood than a condition of survival. The snow doesn’t just decorate the morning; it makes the simple act of eating feel like proof of being here at all.

A small moment that refuses to be sentimental

The poem’s central claim is that presence is made of the simplest pairings: weather and appetite, solitude and salt. By ending on “chewing,” Basho keeps the moment grounded in the body, as if to say that even in a world whitened into silence, life persists as taste, effort, and a lone person continuing.