The Squid Sellers Call - Analysis

A street cry as music

This haiku’s central claim is quiet but firm: in a living world, even the most ordinary human noise can belong to the same soundscape as birdsong. Bashō chooses a humble source, “the squid seller’s call,” not a flute or temple bell. It’s the sound of work, of commerce, of someone trying to be heard. Yet the poem doesn’t treat it as crude intrusion. The tone is attentive and unjudging, as if the speaker is simply standing still long enough to notice how the day actually sounds.

The cuckoo doesn’t “answer”

The other voice is “the cuckoo,” a bird whose call is often tied to seasonal feeling in Japanese poetry. Here, though, the cuckoo isn’t framed as pure nature correcting the marketplace. The poem doesn’t say the bird “overpowers” or “interrupts” the seller; it says the sounds “mingles.” That verb matters: it suggests simultaneity and mixture, not competition. Instead of turning the cuckoo into a symbol of escape from human life, Bashō lets it exist alongside the seller’s need to sell.

“Mingles” as the poem’s hinge

The pivot of the poem is the moment the two sources of sound become one experience. Before “mingles,” you can imagine separation: a person calling out squid, a bird calling from a tree. After “mingles,” the listener can’t keep the categories clean. That creates a small tension: the squid seller’s call is intentional, aimed at customers, while the cuckoo’s voice is indifferent to human attention. And yet the ear receives both as a single braided event. The poem invites a kind of listening that doesn’t rank voices by dignity.

What the poem refuses to separate

By placing “the squid seller’s call” and “the voice / of the cuckoo” on the same level, the haiku refuses the easy story that nature is elsewhere and human life is mere distraction. It’s as if Bashō is saying: the world you actually inhabit is made of overlaps. The seller’s cry carries the smell of the sea and the press of livelihood; the cuckoo carries the wider field of the season. In this brief moment, both are true at once, and the poem’s calmness suggests that this mixture is not a problem to solve but a reality to hear.

A sharper question hiding in the calm

If the cuckoo’s “voice” can mingle with a market call, what else have we been training ourselves not to hear? The haiku doesn’t romanticize the seller, but it also doesn’t silence him to make room for the bird. It asks the reader to accept that the marketplace, too, is part of the day’s music.