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The original

tsuki hayashi / kozue wa ame wo / mochinagara

That is the source, in romaji. It is printed here rather than kept in a footnote because the English above is machine-made, not a scholar’s, and you should be able to check it against something rather than take it on trust.

The rendering follows the sense rather than forcing 5-7-5. Japanese counts on rather than syllables, and the two do not line up; padding a translation out to fit the English shape is how you end up with a poem the poet did not write.

Matsuo Bashō 1644–1694

The figure who turned the opening verse of a linked-verse sequence into a form that could stand alone. He spent much of his later life travelling on foot through Japan, and the journal of one of those journeys, Oku no Hosomichi — usually The Narrow Road to the Deep North — is the most widely read work in the tradition.

23 more from Bashō

• An old pond. / A frog jumps in. / The sound of water.
• On a bare branch / a crow has settled. / Autumn dusk.
• Summer grasses — / all that is left / of the warriors' dreams.
• Such stillness — / the cicadas' crying / soaks into the rocks.
• A rough sea, / and stretched out toward Sado, / the River of Heaven.
• Sick on a journey, / and my dreams go wandering / over withered fields.
• Gathering the rains / of all the summer, and swift — / the Mogami River.
• The rose of Sharon / at the roadside — my horse / has eaten it.
• First cold rain of winter: / even the monkey looks like / he wants a straw coat.
• This road — / and no one walking it. / Autumn dusk.
• Say anything at all / and your lips go cold: / the autumn wind.
• A cloud of blossoms — / is that bell Ueno, / or Asakusa?
• Nothing in the voice / of the cicada suggests / how soon it will die.
• Scent of chrysanthemums, / and in Nara, / all the old buddhas.
• Gravestone, move — / the sound of my crying / is the autumn wind.
• For a little while / the moon will rest / above the blossoms.
• The sea darkening — / the wild duck's cry / faintly white.
• Peaks of cloud — / how many have crumbled away / into the moon's mountain?
• Turn the horse / sideways across the field — / a cuckoo!
• How admirable — / to see the lightning / and draw no lesson from it.
• The cuckoo — / and where its cry goes out, / a single island.
• The winter wind / hides itself in the bamboo / and goes quiet.
• It would melt in my hand — / my tears are that hot — / this autumn frost.

Why this is here at all

HaikuMail is a Chrome extension that hides your inbox behind a search-only reader, and holds the first thirty seconds with a poem. This is one of the 157 it draws from. That is the rest of the story.