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The River of Heaven: The Haiku of Basho, Buson, Issa, and Shiki QUOTES

The River of Heaven: The Haiku of Basho, Buson, Issa, and Shiki QUOTES

1 " THE MOTHER SPARROW take ni iza / ume ni iza to ya / oya suzume Let’s be off to the bamboo, to the peach trees, says the mother sparrow. Issa was more than sympathetic. He felt an intimacy with the mother sparrow that relates to what John Keats must have felt when he wrote, “The setting sun will always set me to rights, and if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and peck about the gravel.”6 Issa and Keats lived in different times and in far distant cultures, yet unknowingly their relationship was mar velously close—as close as their relationship with the little birds was. LOOK "

― Robert Aitken , The River of Heaven: The Haiku of Basho, Buson, Issa, and Shiki