Hanazakari sugi mo ya suru to kawazu naku Ide no yamabuki ushirometashi mo

English Translation

That the height of bloom
may pass while I am away —
where the frogs are heard
the yellow roses of Ide
weigh on me, and will not leave

Meaning

That the height of its bloom may pass while I am gone — the yellow roses of Ide, where the frogs are heard, weigh on me and will not leave my mind.

Commentary

58 Kurozuka

While Taira no Kanemori was in Michinoku, a man descended from the Kan'in prince was living at a place called Kurozuka, and Kanemori teased his daughters as country ogres, composing "Michinoku no Adachigahara no Kurozuka ni oni komoreri to kiku wa makoto ka" and the like. In time he asked for one of the daughters in marriage, but her father said only that she was still very young and that when the proper time came — . Kanemori had to return to the capital, and likening the girl to the yellow roses of Ide he composed "Hanazakari sugi mo ya suru to kawazu naku Ide no yamabuki ushirometashi mo". As for Kurozuka: there was a wife of Lord Tsunetada who worked the name of the hot spring called the Natori Bath into a poem, and she it was who was mistress of Kurozuka. When she composed "Ōzora no kumo no kayoiji mite shi kana tori nomi yukeba ato wa ka mo nashi", Kanemori heard it and composed in the same manner "Shiogama no ura ni wa ama ya taenikemu nado sunadori no miyuru toki naki". As for the girl on whom Kanemori had set his heart, what he had feared came to pass. She came up to the capital with another man; and Kanemori, not knowing it, wrote asking why she had not let him know she had come. She sent back the very poem he had made about the yellow roses of Ide, saying it was his present. Understanding at last that he had been refused, he composed "Toshi o hete nurewataritsuru koromode o kyō no namida ni kuchi ya shinuramu" and sent it. That is the whole of the section.
Taira no Kanemori is one of the thirty-six poetic immortals; he exchanges poems with the Lady of Hyōe in the fifty-sixth section and with the daughter of Taira no Nakaki in the fifty-seventh. The man at Kurozuka was a descendant of the Kan'in prince, and his daughters are the ones Kanemori teased. Of Lord Tsunetada's wife the prose says only that she was mistress of Kurozuka.
The setting is the point at which Kanemori had to return to the capital.
What prompted the poem was the father's answer to his proposal: that the girl was still young, and that when the proper time came — . He left the province with nothing settled.
Later the girl came up to the capital with another man, and when Kanemori enquired she sent this very poem back to him as his present. In the second half of the section it returns to him in a way he had not foreseen.

The opening fears that the height of the bloom may pass, its grammar one of apprehension rather than statement.
Ide, in Yamashiro province, had long been famous in poetry for its yellow roses and its frogs. The girl is made into those roses.
The closing word means: it weighs on me, I cannot stop worrying. What he fears is that while he is away the flower will pass its best — that she will become another man's.
The prose later records that this is exactly what happened. A poem of apprehension turns out to have been a prediction; and by sending it back to him unaltered, she makes it the cruellest thing he could have received.

Source

Yamato Monogatari

Other