The Bashō code

“Haiku shows us what we knew all the time, but did not know we knew; 
it shows us that we are poets in so far as we live at all.
”
R. H. Blyth in Haiku (1952)This paper looks at the rhetorical structure of the two haiku texts by Bashō, which display formal and semantic similarities. After giving a brief explanation of the texts, the detailed analysis presents: (i) how the global metaphor of SILENCE IS SOUND connects the two texts, and (ii) how this metaphor navigates diagrammatic interpretations in the revising process, grammatical structure, and phonology across the texts. In our analysis, we hope to illustrate that metaphor and diagram could be treated as an entwined process across multiple texts, and that this type of approach could provide a new interpretation and explication of the interrelated haiku in question.