Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, filling in for David Kern, and today I'm going to read for you for haiku by Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa.

Number one, don't worry spiders. I keep house casually.

Number two, don't kill that fly. Look, it's wringing its hands wringing its feet number three under the

evening moon the snail is stripped to the waist number four for you flees too, the nights must be long. They must be lonely.

Kobayashi Issa was a Japanese poet. He was writing his poetry in the early to mid-1800s.

And he was very well known, as you can hear in the poems that I just read,

a forgiving voice to the small things.

The poems I read had as their central image, spiders, flies, snails, and flees.

So Kobayashi Issa was very well known in his time and still today for finding creatures

that are typically overlooked or undervalued or considered vermin and giving them a dignity,

bestowing upon them an image that is worthy of a poem. And there's some clues in his life what he

saw in that. I'm not typically a huge fan of biographical criticism, meaning looking at an artist's

work or artifact that they've created and then trying to take their life and impose it as a means

of interpretation. That's not what I'm trying to do. But and impose it as a means of interpretation.

That's not what I'm trying to do.

But I do think that there's some clues in his life, which was really full of sorrow,

that motivates this need to dignify the small and the undervalued.

His life was marked by sorrow.

His first wife died, and all three of his children, he had a very unsuccessful and unhappy

second marriage, his house burned down.

And then he married again.

So his life, excuse me, was marked by loss.

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