Cherry from the bank
has fallen and spread itself
across the pond's face—
and these flowers of the wave
that are now at their fullest
- Meaning
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The cherry from the water's edge has fallen and spread across the pond; and it is these flowers of the waves that are now at their height.
- Commentary
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The Initiates' Chapter: The Progress to Ōhara
Hearing that the empress was living hidden at Ōhara, the cloistered emperor Go-Shirakawa, who had long wished to visit Jakkō-in, waited out the cold of the second and third months and made the journey in the middle of the fourth, after the Kamo festival. It was a private progress, but Sanesada and five other nobles, eight courtiers, and several guards went with him. On the way he stopped to look at Fudaraku-ji, founded by Kiyohara no Fukayabu, and at the ruins of the Ono empress dowager's residence.
It was past the twentieth of the fourth month and spring was ending. Pushing through summer grass along a mountain track no one seemed to have used, the cloistered emperor was taken with the strangeness of the country. After a while a hall came into sight at the foot of the western hills. An old garden pond and stand of trees gave it an air of long standing, and the young grass of the garden was at its thickest. Wisteria hung pale purple from the pines on the island in the pond, and a late cherry added its color. A mountain cuckoo called once, as if it knew what was fitting, and made the scene finer still.
There the cloistered emperor composed this.
The cherry has fallen onto the water and covered its surface. He calls that covering "flowers of the wave," and says it is these that are at their height.
The cherry on the branch is finished. Only after falling does it come into its season, on the water. The reversal—that fullness comes after the scattering—is the whole of the poem.
He is about to meet a woman living in a decayed hut: a house that stood at the summit destroyed, and its daughter in a hermitage in the hills. Fullness after the fall is also a figure for the person he is going to see. He does not say so. It is set down as a poem about the pond in front of him, and what it withholds is what the reader is left to notice.
This cloistered emperor was the most dangerous adversary the Taira had. In Volume Three, Kiyomori shut him up at Toba; in Volume Seven he saw what the Taira intended and slipped out of his palace alone. It is with this man's visit to the daughter of the ruined house that the heart of the Initiates' Chapter begins.
ikemizu……the water of a pond.
migiwa……the water's edge.
chirishikite……fallen and spread over.
nami no hana……flowers of the waves; here, cherry on the water.
sakari……the height of a season.
Ōhara gokō……the cloistered emperor's progress to Ōhara.
gubu……accompanying in a retinue.
Sanesada……Fujiwara no Sanesada, who appears in Volume Five.
Fudaraku-ji……a temple at Ōhara.
Kamo no matsuri……the Kamo shrine festival of the fourth month.
- Source
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Heike Monogatari
- Other
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