A Narrow Road To The Deep North Matsuo Bashou Analysis

A Narrow Road to the Deep North by Matsuo Bashou, is a well-known travel piece by an incredible poet, but because of its use of poetry feels less like a travel piece and more like a snapshot of the human experience through a journey. This journey is a search for spiritual enlightenment, although, along the way, Bashou captures human emotion through his poetry, as he experiences loneliness, wanderlust, worries of failure, insignificance among nature’s grandeur and spiritual rebirth. Beyond the physical travel itself, Bashou’s poetry gives us a glimpse into the complex emotions a human can experience through travel, by presenting the reader with images that evoke specific emotional responses. Bashou solidifies the readers’ understanding of his

The poem captures the idea very simply, but brings striking scenes of nature’s beauty to mind. This allows the reader a glimpse into the feeling of spiritual connectivity with a travel scene. Earlier within the text, Bashou also captures the feeling of rebirth and the feeling of being awestruck by nature’s beauty, and even subtle hints a spiritual rebirth through nature and travel. While visiting a temple in Nikko, which he explains was re-named to mean “light of the sun”. He is in awe of the scene at this temple and writes a poem graced by small but spiritually important details.

“So holy; green leaves, young leaves, in sun’s light” (Bashou 51.)

The reader can imagine this scene vividly even from subtle details it’s easy to envision the sun’s rays trickling through new leaves in a tree. A similar idea occurs in a second poem on the same

Bashou, in his travels, takes the time to notice these small things, but because we are brought to pay specific attention to these details such as, young leaves in the sun’s light at this particular temple, or change of his travel companion that is paralleled to the aesthetic a grandiose mountain. These images beckon forth and notion of rebirth, newness, something fragile but significant, newly blossomed spirituality change within his short prose. The poetry is simple but effective at conveying these emotions and ideas. Through Bashou’s poetry we get a glimpse into his human-ness, his emotions, and his spirituality all at once. Human through his ability to connect nature to his own feelings, and spirituality. The use of poetry, presents subtle details that require special attention and allows the reader to call up their own ideas and get a pseudo-sense of what Bashou felt along his journey in a way that likely wouldn’t have been captured without the poetry. The art is subtle and human and requires thought to understand and answer the question why did Bashou include these poems? Instead of him just saying he felt wanderlust, spiritual, awestruck, etc., he shows the reader, through the poetry, that allows