Kumo narade kodakaki mine ni iru mono wa ukiyo o somuku waga mi narikeri

English Translation

Not cloud — the thing that
sits on this peak among the
high trees turns out to
be myself, who have turned my
back on a world of hardship

Meaning

It is not cloud. The thing that sits on this high-treed peak turns out to be myself, who have turned my back on a world of hardship.

Commentary

50 The High-Treed Peak

The priest Kaisen composed this poem when he had climbed the mountain. The prose says no more, and the section consists of this single poem.
Kaisen is the same man who appears in the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth sections: in the first he lives in the hills and quarrels with his parent over sending down his washing, and in the second he exchanges poems with guests gathered at his house in the autumn of the year his father died.
The setting is the top of the mountain he climbed, described in the poem as a peak among high trees.
What prompted the poem was the climb itself.
The section ends with the poem; no response and no later event is recorded. The forty-ninth section beside it gives poems from a High Priestess, one who serves the gods, and this one gives a poem from a man who serves the Buddha. It was later included in the Shinshūi-shū.

The first phrase denies the obvious: not cloud. What sits on a high peak is normally cloud, and the poem begins by ruling that out.
The verb in the third line means to be settled there, to be sitting in place, so that he occupies the peak as cloud would.
To turn one's back on a world of hardship is to take holy orders.
The final verb marks a discovery: it was himself. Cast as a realisation that what is up there is not cloud but a man, the poem in fact takes the measure of where taking orders has put him. The height of the peak and the distance from the world are laid one over the other.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other