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 fire is out;” on the contrary, it means that the fire, of course the charcoal fire, is buried under the ashes. The poem is a poem of winter night which becomes late, and when a charcoal fire already small grows still dearer as it is more cold without, perhaps windy; now the talk of the guest or visitor (lo, his sad lone shadow on the wall) and the master poet stops, then it starts again, like a little stream hidden under the grasses; and the desolation of the advanced night intensifies the sadness of the house, doubtless Basho An whose small body is wrapped by a few large leaves of Basho’s beloved banana tree in the garden. You must know, before you attempt to understand it, a few points of the poet’s characteristics, above all, the way of his living, and the general aspect of his house, I mean Basho An, the poetical poverty of which will be seen from the fact that he made a big hole in the wall to place a tiny Buddha statue as he had no place to enshrine it; not only this Basho’s hokkus, nearly all the seventeen-syllable poems that were produced in the early age, you will find difficult to understand when separated from the circumstances Rh