Juxtaposé:
Michael Dylan Welch and Bashō

A few hundred years earlier, Bashō wrote1:

Looking toward Sado Island from a post town called Izumozaki in the province of Echigo

araumi ya Sado ni yokotau amanogawa

the rough sea—

flowing toward Sado Isle

the River of Heaven

Bashō

First things first, amanogawa is literally “Heaven’s River” and is used to mean the Milky Way. It is also a kigo (early autumn).

Bashō had stayed at Izumozaki on the night of August 18, 1689. Sado Island was a place where prisoners were exiled and was also a past source of gold.

Kuniharu sees Bashō’s haiku this way:

What are the similarities and dissimilarities between these haiku?

First, both haiku take place in early autumn on the shore. In both cases, the author is caught by the night sky and there is an element of movement in that sky, either figuratively or literally (River of Heaven, meteor shower).

For Bashō, it’s the sea that is rough and the stars that are gentle. He feels some loneliness (read the interpretations of this haiku written by Bashō scholars included in Makoto Ueda’s Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary) and that relates him to the prisoners on Sado.

For Michael Dylan Welch, the sea is calm and gentle and it’s the stars that are “shooting” and rough. He’s also not alone; he is enjoying the night’s display with at least one other person.

This is shown even by the order of images in the haiku. Bashō starts with earthly despair as shown by the rough sea and then looks towards the heavens. Welch starts with the display in the sky and then comes to focus on earthly contentment as shown by a gentle wave and then the companionship of others.

So, with similar elements, Welch has transformed Bashō’s loneliness and thoughts of a hard life into companionship and security in this life. Romantic in every sense of the word.

1 Translated by Makoto Ueda, in Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 260.