A very effective hokku by Bashō:
(Winter)
Waking suddenly;
A water pot burst
In the icy night.
I have added the “suddenly” (as Blyth also does in his translation) because it is implied by the event. The jug has burst because of the frozen water expanding within it.
The hokku is effective not only because of the sensory sound of the bursting pottery jug, but also because it so well expresses the deep cold of a winter night.
Here’s the original:
Kame wareru yoru no kōri no nezame kana
Pot has-burst night ‘s ice ‘s waking kana
Now for some “blog business”:
I have tallied reader responses to my question whether comments on this site should be private unless otherwise requested (the long-time policy), or whether all comments should be public unless requested to be kept private by the sender.
The overwhelming consensus of reader opinion was for a change to all comments being made public unless otherwise requested (the exceptions, of course, being spam, irrelevant comments, obscenities, etc.).
So, as of today, that is the new comments policy on this site. All comments made on any posting, new or old, will from now on be posted as public comments, accessible through the “comments” link at the bottom of the relevant posting.
There will usually be an interval before the comments appear, because they will still go through moderation to sort out the exceptions mentioned above, but they will be posted as soon as I see the incoming comments.
Those who want a comment to be seen by my eyes only need only put the word “private” at the beginning of the comment, and it will not be made public.
I hope we will all be pleased by the results.
David
HOKKU 
Sounds good to me.
Re Basho’s verse… Back in my youth and my nomadic days I worked at a lodge in Alberta, Canada during the winter after all the tourists had left. For this I got to stay in one of the cabins. Problem was they were very distinctly summer cabins. The only heat sources were a fireplace and a very small heater (one that might take a chill off a summer night). One especially cold night, I had to make a blanket “tent” in front of the fireplace and stoke the fire all night just to gain a modicum of warmth. I made it through, but in the morning I found all the food on the shelves had frozen. So, I can relate very much to this verse of Basho’s and each time I come across it, I am in that tent again trying to survive a “pot-bursting” night.