On love and barley - Haiku of Basho

Basho, one of the greatest of Japanese poets and the master of haiku, was also a Buddhist monk and a life-long traveller.

His poems combine 'karumi', or lightness of touch, with the Zen ideal of oneness with creation.

Each poem evokes the natural world - the cherry blossom, the leaping frog, the summer moon or the winter snow - suggesting the smallness of human life in comparison to the vastness and drama of nature.

Basho himself enjoyed solitude and a life free from possessions, and his haiku are the work of an observant eye and a meditative mind, uncluttered by materialism and alive to the beauty of the world around him.