“Old dark sleepy pool…
Quick unexpected frog
Goes plop! Watersplash!”

— Bashō Matsuo

Source: Japanese Haiku

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Old dark sleepy pool… Quick unexpected frog Goes plop! Watersplash!" by Bashō Matsuo?

Bashō Matsuo 46

Japanese poet 1644–1694

Related quotes

“The frog-pool wanted a king.
Jove sent them Old King Log.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

Source: Claudius the God (1935), Ch. 30.
Context: The frog-pool wanted a king.
Jove sent them Old King Log.
I have been as deaf and blind and wooden as a log.
The frog-pool wanted a king.
Let Jove now send them Young King Stork.
Caligula's chief fault: his stork-reign was too brief.
My chief fault: I have been far too benevolent.
I repaired the ruin my predecessors spread.
I reconciled Rome and the world to monarchy again.
Rome is fated to bow to another Caesar.
Let him be mad, bloody, capricious, wasteful, lustful.
King Stork shall prove again the nature of kings.
By dulling the blade of tyranny I fell into great error.
By whetting the same blade I might redeem that error.
Violent disorders call for violent remedies.
Yet I am, I must remember, Old King Log.
I shall float inertly in the stagnant pool.
Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.

“The old pond:
A frog jumps in,—
The sound of the water.”

Bashō Matsuo Frog Poem

古池や
蛙飛び込む
水の音
furu ike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto
Classical Japanese Database, Translation #64 http://carlsensei.com/classical/index.php/translation/view/64 (Translation: Reginald Horace Blyth)
At the ancient pond
the frog plunges into
the sound of water
Translation: Sam Hamill
Old pond,
leap-splash –
a frog.
Basho, On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho, London, 1985, p. 58 (Translation: Lucien Stryk)
Breaking the silence
Of an ancient pond,
A frog jumped into water –
A deep resonance.
Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, London, 1966, p. 9 (Translation: Nobuyuki Yuasa)
Individual poems

“An amphibophile is the sort of girl who goes around kissing princes in the hope that one of them will turn into a frog.”

Michael Kurland book The Unicorn Girl

Source: The Unicorn Girl (1969), Chapter 10 (p. 137)

“Eternally the choking steam goes up
From the black pools of seething oil…”

Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943) poet, short story writer, novelist

Source: Young Adventure (1918), The Lover in Hell

“Ascended Kynthos alone, the cave of Apollo – half-way magnificent and majestic. A pool with fine fig trees nearby full of giant (sacred?) toads – leaping and barking. Also green frogs.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

1961 - 1975

“The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Source: The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995), Ch. 2 : Science and Hope
Context: I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudo-science and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us-then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.