Each spring, the flowing stream
I take for blossoms,
and reaching for flowers
that cannot be plucked,
my sleeves are wet with water.
- Meaning
- Each spring, mistaking the plum blossoms reflected in the flowing stream for real flowers, I reach out to pluck them and end up wetting my sleeves in the river’s water.
- Commentary
-
Spring Songs, Book One
A poem composed on seeing plum blossoms blooming by the waterside.
Though the scene is beautiful, would one truly mistake flowers reflected in the water for real blossoms and try to take them in hand?
The poem lacks a sense of lived reality.
- Author
- Ise
- Source
- Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- In the spring night’s dark, how pointless is the deep gloom— plum blossoms: though their color is not seen, how could their scent be hidden?
- You—who knows? your heart I do not know; as for this old home, only the blossoms, as of old, still give forth their scent.
- Over the years, the water that becomes the flowers’ mirror— when blossoms scatter down, would one say the water’s mirror has grown clouded?
- Coming and going, I did not let my eyes leave the plum blossoms— at dusk I looked on them, at dawn I looked on them; yet when did they fade away?