Staying At An Inn - Analysis

An inn where everything shares the same night

Bashō’s haiku makes a quiet, startling claim: the same moonlight covers the “inn” and the people society tries to keep in the dark. The poem begins in an ordinary travel situation, “Staying at an inn,” then immediately complicates it with the blunt fact that “prostitutes are also sleeping.” Instead of turning moralistic or lurid, the poem turns outward to “bush clover and the moon,” as if to say: the world does not flinch. Nature does not segregate.

The tone is restrained, almost reportorial, but that restraint is what gives the scene its ethical weight. Bashō doesn’t explain how the speaker feels; he places human bodies at rest beside plant and sky, and lets the reader feel the friction.

The jolt: “also sleeping”

The key word is “also.” “Prostitutes” are introduced not through their work but through their vulnerability: they are “sleeping.” That phrasing quietly levels the room. Everyone at the inn is doing the same human thing, and the poem insists on that shared condition. There’s a faint, humane tenderness in choosing sleep rather than sex as the defining detail.

At the same time, the line carries social reality with it. An “inn” that houses travelers “where prostitutes are also sleeping” hints at a mixed, slightly seedy lodging, a place where respectable and disreputable lives brush against each other. The poem doesn’t clean that up; it simply refuses to turn the women into spectacle.

Bush clover: modest beauty at the threshold

“Bush clover” is a small, wild, seasonal plant, not a grand flower arranged for admiration. It suggests the overlooked and the peripheral, beauty that grows at the edge of paths. Placed next to the prostitutes’ presence, the clover feels like a deliberate echo: something considered minor, common, perhaps even disposable, yet undeniably part of the landscape.

That echo creates a tension the poem never resolves: are the prostitutes being honored by the comparison, or is the poem pointing to how easily people are treated like scenery? The clover image is gentle, but it doesn’t let the reader off the hook.

The moon: impartial light, not romantic decoration

The “moon” can be read as a classic emblem of purity or transcendence, but here it functions more like a witness. It shines on the inn, on sleeping bodies, and on the clover without preference. The poem’s turn after the dash moves from human category (“prostitutes”) to a world that does not categorize in that way. In that shift, the moon becomes a kind of moral counterargument: whatever judgments circulate inside the inn, the night itself keeps offering unearned light.

Because the poem ends on “the moon,” it leaves the reader with spaciousness rather than scandal. The last image doesn’t erase the women’s situation; it enlarges the frame until condemnation feels small.

A sharper question the poem quietly asks

If the prostitutes are “also sleeping,” what does that make the speaker: a fellow sleeper, a fellow customer, a fellow body under the same moon? The poem’s calmness can feel almost unsettling here, because it suggests that the distance we like to maintain is, in the most basic sense, imaginary. Under “bush clover and the moon,” everyone is simply temporary.

Two readings: compassion, and the limit of seeing

On the surface, the haiku is a travel note by Bashō, the Edo-period Japanese poet famous for letting brief scenes carry large feeling. A traveler stays at a cheap inn, notices who else is there, and then notices the night outside. But a deeper reading is that the poem records a moment when the speaker’s mind tries to label and separate, and the world answers with a softer, wider truth: clover and moonlight don’t cooperate with stigma.

Still, the poem’s brevity keeps an edge. The women are seen only as “prostitutes,” not as individuals; the speaker’s gaze both resists judgment and participates in reduction. The haiku holds that contradiction and ends not with a solution, but with a moon that continues to shine anyway.