Mishi yo koso kawarazaru rame kurehatete haru yori natsu ni utsuru kozue mo

English Translation

The world that I knew
cannot have altered at all—
spring is wholly gone,
and there too the branch-tips turn
from the spring into summer.

Meaning

Surely the world I knew is unchanged: there too the spring is wholly over, and the branch-tips are turning from spring into summer.

Commentary

Section 19 The Cuckoo: The Exchange with Tameko

At the beginning of the fourth month a courier is going, and she writes again to the same Gon-Chunagon, saying among other things how she misses last year's spring and summer, and sends two poems. A reply comes again. It says that the grass and the trees are unchanged, just as she saw them last year, and yet nothing feels as it did — the poem running straight on into the prose of the letter — and then, turning to the question about the cuckoo, gives another poem. The lady adds that the Middle Captain Sanekata, having heard no cuckoo by the fifth month, is said to have sent from the province of Mutsu the lines about a cuckoo grown stale in the ears of the capital while the one on this side of the barrier suffers; that she was put in mind of that precedent, and that this letter of Abutsu-ni's was particularly graceful. Meanwhile the end of the fourth month came, and Abutsu-ni gave up hearing even a faint first note. Then she heard at second hand that at a place called Hiki-no-yatsu a great many voices had been heard by someone, and on hearing it she turns a poem over alone; but there is no help in it. Perhaps in the east, all the way to the far end of Mutsu, cuckoos have always been rare. If they did not sing at all it would be easier; that some rare person should have heard them seems to her, with all her heart, a thing to resent.

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; since Tamenori was a son of Tameie and a younger brother of Tameuji, she is a granddaughter of Abutsu-ni's late husband. After the enquiry in winter, the practice poems in spring and the exchange during the fever, the correspondence continues here with the same person. The Middle Captain Sanekata cited in the letter is the mid-Heian poet Fujiwara no Sanekata, who went down to the east as governor of Mutsu.

Around the beginning of the fourth month of Koan 3 (1280), a poem in a letter sent from Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura to the capital.

A courier being at hand, she wrote to the Gon-Chunagon that she missed last year's spring and summer, and sent two poems; this is the first.

The reply is "Kusa mo ki mo kozo mishi mama ni kawaranedo arishi ni mo ninu kokochi nomi shite," which grants as fact what this poem states as conjecture and then turns concessive.

The poem guesses that the seasons of the capital are still as they were last year. The emphatic particle in the first line binds to the conjectural form at the end of the second. The phrase for the world she once saw means the capital as she used to know it, a place she cannot see now. The auxiliary in the second line is a present conjecture, the form for guessing at what is happening out of sight. The third line means that spring is entirely over, which suits the first days of the fourth month. The fourth line names the turn of the season, and the additive particle in the closing line piles on: even the branch-tips must be as they were. The poem ends on the noun for those branch-tips, leaving unsaid the implication that the only thing altered is where she herself now stands. Since "Oboro naru tsuki wa miyako no sora nagara mada kikazarishi nami no yoruyoru" the habit of setting capital against east, dividing what is unchanged from what is not, has continued; here only the unchanged side is sung.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other