Saigyo

Saigyō (1118-1190, born Norikio Satō) is among Japan’s most celebrated and enduring poets. As a young man, he was a samurai and served as a low-class imperial guard. A brief love affair with the highest-ranking lady in the court, and a strong desire to be free from violence, drove him to leave the life he knew to become a devoted Buddhist monk who lived in solitude and wandered near and far. His wandering life was profoundly intimate with the natural world, and his time immersed in nature inspired his deeply felt poetry. Saigyō’'s genre was waka, a one-column poem consisting of phrases comprising five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables. During his lifetime, war and a major political shift from imperial to military administration devastated the people and the land, but Saigyō was a friend to all people. He exchanged poetry with an exiled emperor, former court ladies, a prostitute, and renowned poets. And in one seminal poem that voices his intimate feeling and identification with the natural world and his life as a monk, he expressed the desire to die close to the day of the Buddha’s passing in the middle of spring, while sitting beneath a full moon with a canopy of cherry blossoms blooming overhead. He managed to accomplish this as his last poetic expression.

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