Years End - Analysis

A broomstroke that tries to reach the whole world

Basho’s haiku turns a simple seasonal act into a sweeping moral and existential gesture. At “Year’s end,” the speaker notices not just a room being cleaned but “all / corners” being addressed, as if the closing of the calendar demands a reckoning. The central claim the poem quietly makes is that ending a year creates an urge to make things orderly and clean, even while the world itself remains ungraspable and impermanent.

“Year’s end”: a deadline that feels physical

The opening phrase is blunt: “Year’s end.” It lands like a date circled on paper, but it also feels like a bodily sensation, the pressure of time running out. That pressure explains the poem’s sudden wideness. We start with a moment, then immediately expand to “all / corners,” a phrase that suggests neglected places, tucked-away dust, and things we prefer not to look at. The tone is brisk and unsentimental, more like a practical resolve than a celebration.

“Floating world”: impermanence inside ordinary life

Then Basho drops the phrase “floating world,” which carries the Japanese idea of ukiyo: a world that drifts, changes, and refuses permanence, sometimes associated with passing pleasures and everyday bustle. Calling the world “floating” makes the cleaning impulse feel slightly tragic. How do you tidy something that won’t stay put? The poem’s key tension is between the desire to finish, to straighten and complete, and the fact that the world is defined by motion and instability.

“Swept”: cleansing, erasure, and the wish to start again

The final word, “swept,” delivers both comfort and unease. On one level, it’s satisfying: dust removed, corners cleared. On another, “swept” hints at being carried away, erased, or brushed aside by time itself. The haiku’s small turn is that what looks like human housekeeping becomes, by the end, almost cosmic: as if the year, like a broom, has gone through “all corners” of the “floating world,” taking something with it.

A sharp question hiding in the cleanliness

If the world is “floating,” what exactly gets cleaned at year’s end: the world, or our feeling about it? The poem allows the possibility that sweeping is less about changing reality than about giving the mind a brief, believable sense of closure.