Bashō's Hokku
Twenty-nine hokku by Matsuo Bashō, among them the dream of the withered moor and the summer grasses over the battlefield, in B. H. Chamberlain's literal English verse of 1902.
Measured across the book
Across its 58 lines, 94% of stressed syllables fall on the beat (95% interval 91% to 97%). Alliteration runs at 1.01 times what shuffling the words would give (0.24 observed against 0.24 expected). 24% of the lines have a feminine ending.
Baselines and intervals are described in the methods.
Contents
Hokku 30iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 31iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 33iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 34iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 37iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 38iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 46iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 47iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 74iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 75iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 77iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 78iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 79iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 80iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 82iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 83iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 84iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 85iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 86iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 87iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 88iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 89iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 90iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 91iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 92iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 93iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 94iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 95iambic tetrameter · 2 linesHokku 96iambic tetrameter · 2 lines
About this text
Public domain. Text from Basho and the Japanese Poetical Epigram (Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, vol. XXX, part 2), Internet Archive. Free to read, print, copy and reuse.