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It seems like this is a remnant of (or reference to) older forms of Japanese.
Is that all there is to it, or does it have special meaning?

Examples from songs:

> 歌声 笑い声 満ちる大空 目指すは憧れ

(DuDiDuWa*lalala - KOTOKO)

> 吹きやまぬは残り風 [...]  
>  巡りゆくはこの心

(残り風 - いきものがかり)

And lastly, the same with が:  
(At least I _suspect_ that it's not the "but" kind of が. Feels like the
subject particle for some reason.)

> 巡り逢ったが 運の尽き

(刀と鞘 - ALI PROJECT)
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2011-08-31T20:30:05.880
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question
grammar particles verbs particle-は archaic-language
What is the nuance when は directly follows a verb in plain form?
This construct was common in classical Japanese, but now it is archaic or
poetic. In classical Japanese, the attributive form of conjugating words can
be directly followed by particles which attach to nouns (without inserting の).
目指すは would become 目指すのは in modern Japanese, 吹きやまぬは would become 吹きやまぬのは or
吹きやまないのは, and so on.
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2011-08-31T21:38:52.653
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Tsuyoshi Ito has already answered this question, but I'd like to add one
detail:

I think I see `目指すは〜` a lot more than other verbs followed by は. Although I
can't find it in any dictionaries, from personal experience I think it might
be common enough to be considered something like a set phrase, or possibly a
holdover from when this grammar was more common.

Searching [_The Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese
(BCCWJ)_](http://www.kotonoha.gr.jp/shonagon/) for 目指すは, I find 73 results, of
which 4 look like false positives (they matched はず rather than the particle
は). So that's 69 results, and given the size of the corpus, I think that's a
fairly large number. For comparison, the corpus has 194 results for カタツムリ.

A lot of the corpus results for 目指すは look something like this:

> 目指すは **優勝だ** ！

And that's more or less how I'm used to seeing this phrase used. [Searching
for the same phrase on
Google](https://www.google.com/search?hl=ja&q=%22%E7%9B%AE%E6%8C%87%E3%81%99%E3%81%AF%22)
gives a lot of similar results.

In any case, I think it's worth learning as a pattern of its own.
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2014-05-24T12:36:59.387
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answer