Bashô wrote:

Every year
They fertilize the cherry trees –
Fallen petals.

In the original “fallen petals” is literally  ”flower dust.”

The atmosphere is somewhat reminiscent of Tennyson’s “Tithonus,” yet with its sense of the autumnal even in spring:

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.

The out-of-place feeling of autumn is found more clearly in another verse by  Bashô:

New Year’s Day;
Recalling the loneliness
Of an autumn evening.

There is something displeasing about this, no doubt because the mind is not in the moment but wandering elsewhere, more a characteristic of other kinds of verse than of good hokku.  It may be the quiet and solitude of New Year’s Day that brings on this sense of autumn, but nonetheless….

And somewhat akin to that is

In plum blossom fragrance,
One phrase — “the past” –
Is sadness.

It is more awkward in English than in the original, but we get his meaning.  The fragrance of the blossoms combined with the sudden thought of what is forever gone brings that indefinable feeling of nostalgia tinged with wistfulness that the Japanese call aware — the inherent sadness behind all things  – spring included – in a world in which nothing is lasting.

Whatever we may think of the quality level of these hokku, we can see that  Bashô had a very strong sense of transience. 

When reading him over time, one begins to recognize the peculiar character of  his hokku, the sense of its earliness in the hokku tradition when it was still more closely related not only to lighter and literary wordplay but also to the serious and somewhat melancholy atmosphere of traditional waka.  Sometimes we see one aspect emphasized in Bashô’s verse, sometimes another, but even his more frivolous and amusing examples, when read in the overall context of his body of work, seem underlain by sadness.

And we see also, as we come to know his verse in its entirely, that haikai was not just something  Bashô did now and then to make a living, with his real life elsewhere.  Haikai was his life and how he lived it — its very expression. 

David