Week 5 Analysis: Close Reading

Close Reading 

Week 5

Matsuo Basho 

  The part of the poems I want to focus my close reading the beginning paragraph of pg.617 "From the Narrow Road to the Deep North", this first poem in my opinion mark the genius of Basho's travel to the Northwest. This was a section where he pondered deeply on his journey and in words making sense of this five month journey by sea. I am intrigued by the use of the word "wanderlust" in the reading just putting the exclamation on the future voyage. Also Basho uses the vocabulary that of wanderlust to explain what he meant in the sentence before where he stated ,"Many, too, are the ancients who perished on the road", explains why he choose to cruise the sea instead of continuing  to depart on road. Then Basho began to paint a picture for us in the poem by explaining the length of the journey. "Floating away their lives on boats", or in other words a metaphor to mark the beginnings of a long journey. Although all of this evidence might make me think that this section was written at the beginning of the journey in the informational section of the text it say's these writings were an idealized version of the travel and not a diary. So this start of the story might not have been from the beginning but a start of writing at any point of the joinery describing when they first sailed off on this travel. Anyway, I might be thinking to hard so the reality that this is from the begging of this challenge ahead of Basho and he began this writing when it actually started to be finish by the end. Basho used this section to begin his story telling through poems to mark the start of a journey that him and his companion Sora was about to embark on and used imagery to grab his readers early. In other words, the author used the introduction to show of his skillful poetry skills which gave readers the interest of continuing the story.