Saigyo

"The pathway I marked when last year I made my way into Yoshino— I abandon now to visit blossoms I have not yet seen."

"Even a person free of passion would be moved to sadness: autumn evening in a marsh where snipes fly up."

"Let me not spend my life lamenting the world’s sorrows for above in the wide sky the moon shines pure"

"That spring long ago at Naniwa in Tsu— was it all a dream? Now only dead leaves on the reeds rustle in the passing wind."

"What's to be done? I thought I was past caring for the spring but my frozen water pipe has made me long for it again"

"How I delight in this well-timed snow that buries the mountain path behind me as I enter intent on long seclusion"

"That one back home whom I promised to think about when I saw the moon: on this night perhaps she too will be soaking her sleeves with tears."

"This is what I want: to die in the springtime, beneath the blossoms— midway through the Second Month, when the moon is at the full."

"In a dream I saw the winds of spring scattering the cherry blossoms— and after I woke, the sound was still rustling in my breast."

"The cherries' only fault: the crowds that gather when they bloom."

"It creates a heart even in those among us who think of themselves as indifferent to all things— the world. this first wind of autumn."

"If not for solitude, how dismal my life would be!"

"風になびく 富士の煙の 空にきえて ゆくへも知らぬ わが思ひかな kaze ni nabiku fuji no keburi no sora ni kiete yukue mo shiranu waga omoi kana"

"The poet Saigyo Would have written a poem Even for the woman Washing potatoes."

"The fact that Saigyō composed the poem that begins, "I shall be unhappy without loneliness," shows that he made loneliness his master. He also wrote: In the mountain village who are you calling, yobuko-bird? I thought you lived alone."

"Truly fine poetry sits uncomfortably under any label. Yet, as long as qualifiers do not overwhelm what is universal in the poetry to which they have been attached, they can have value. To forbid any reference to Dante or Milton as "Christian poets" would be to deny something of central importance in the sensibilities and writing of both men. And in a similar fashion we may refer to Saigyo as Japan's foremost "Buddhist" poet—and do so without short-changing what is universal in his verse."