Hanagumori nagamete wataru urakaze ni kasumi tadayou haru no yo no tsuki

English Translation

Blossom-clouded sky,
and I gaze the days away—
on the wind off shore
the haze drifts, and through the haze
the moon of a night in spring.

Meaning

Blossom-clouded skies, and I gaze the days away; haze drifts on the wind off the bay, and behind it the moon of a spring night.

Commentary

Section 17 The Exchange with Tameko

The Gon-Chunagon is a woman who gives herself to poetry without distraction, and so Abutsu-ni gathers together the poems she has lately been writing as practice and sends them to her. Since she lives near the sea, she adds that even when she picks up shells there, this is not the shore of Nagusa and she is not consoled after all; and she sends five poems. She had written them just as the brush ran, as she pleased, and the messenger being in haste they were left looking half-finished; and the reply came back with no delay at all. In it the lady writes that the uncertainty of these days has cleared away, like haze, with this letter, and four poems come with it. The four sent from the capital answer the first, third, fourth and fifth of the poems Abutsu-ni had sent.

Abutsu-ni was a consort of Fujiwara no Tameie and the mother of Tamesuke and Tamemori, living at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura. The Gon-Chunagon is the daughter of Tamenori, the former Captain of the Right Watch, and serves in the household of Omiya-in. Tamenori was a son of Tameie and a younger brother of Tameuji, and the elder half-brother of Tamesuke, so that the Gon-Chunagon is a granddaughter of Abutsu-ni's late husband. She had already written at the start of winter with "Harubaru to omoi koso yare tabigoromo namida shigururu hodo ya ikani to," and this exchange continues that correspondence. The prose calls her a woman who gives herself to poetry without distraction, and this is the section in which the most poems pass between them anywhere in the Kamakura chapters.

Spring of Koan 3 (1280); one of five practice poems sent from Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura to the capital.

It is the third of the five practice poems.

The reply is "Kurabe miyo kasumi no uchi no haru no tsuki harenu kokoro wa onaji nagame o," which takes over the haze, the spring moon and the gazing of this poem.

Almost without verbs, the poem is built by laying one piece of scenery on another. The first line names the faintly clouded sky of cherry-blossom time and opens the poem abruptly on a noun. The verb in the second line means to go on in that state, so that the gazing is not of one day but of many. The third line draws the wind of her own shore into the picture. The fourth line has the haze drifting on that wind. The closing line ends on a noun, setting the moon last after blossom-cloud, shore wind and haze. Four things are set down in order and not one word states a feeling, which is the whole method of the poem, and it suits the prose remark that she wrote just as the brush ran and, the messenger being in haste, left them looking half-finished. The moon that the previous section had made the one thing shared with the capital is here placed dimly behind haze.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other