Under My Tree Roof - Analysis

A shelter that also lets the world in

This haiku’s small drama is that a roof made of living things doesn’t fully shut nature out; it filters it. The speaker is “under my tree-roof,” a phrase that sounds both proud and provisional. It suggests a homemade canopy of branches and leaves, not a solid house. The central claim feels quiet but firm: what we call shelter is often just a different way of being exposed, and the poem finds beauty in that in-between state.

April rain, seen as writing

The rain arrives first as pattern: “slanting lines of april rain.” Instead of describing wetness or cold, Bashō gives us something visual, almost calligraphic—rain as angled strokes across the air. “April” matters because it carries a mixed weather mood: spring’s softness paired with its instability. The tone here is observant and calm, but not sentimental; the speaker doesn’t tell us how to feel, only where to look.

The turn: from lines to drops

The poem’s hinge is in the last phrase: “separate to drops.” What was continuous becomes discrete. That shift can be read literally—rain streaks breaking into beads as they catch on leaves and fall—but it also changes the emotional scale. Lines feel like a sheet of weather, impersonal and wide; drops feel intimate and countable. There’s a tension between unity and individuation: the same rain is both a single slanted curtain and many separate moments landing one by one.

Ownership versus impermanence

One small contradiction sits in the first word: “my.” The speaker claims the “tree-roof,” yet the rain refuses to be owned or held. Even under this personal canopy, the world keeps moving, breaking apart, recombining. The poem’s gentleness comes from accepting that fact: under a roof of leaves, the weather doesn’t stop—it becomes newly visible, turning from “lines” into “drops” right at the edge of the speaker’s shelter.