Honobono to haru koso sora ni kinikerashi ama no kaguyama kasumi tanabiku

English Translation

Faintly, dimly now
it is to the sky that spring
must have come at last
for the heavenly Kagu
mountain the mist is trailing

Meaning

The sky pales faintly with dawn, and it seems that spring has come first to the heavens: mist is trailing across Ama-no-Kaguyama.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 2

Headnote: a poem on the beginning of spring.
This is the second poem, following Yoshitsune's at the head of the anthology. The headnote marks it as a poem on the opening of the year, that is, on the first day of spring. The poet is given by title as Retired Emperor, and here that means Go-Toba, who ordered the compilation of the Shin Kokin Wakashu. The arrangement gives the first place to a subject's poem and the second to the sovereign's own.
Go-Toba (1180-1239) was the fourth son of Emperor Takakura. He acceded in 1183, abdicated in favour of Emperor Tsuchimikado in 1198, and thereafter ruled as cloistered sovereign. He revived the Bureau of Poetry, appointed Fujiwara no Teika and Fujiwara no Ietaka among its fellows, and had the Shin Kokin Wakashu compiled. Defeated in the Jokyu disturbance of 1221, he was exiled to Oki, where he died.
The hour of the poem is first light; the place is Ama-no-Kaguyama in Yamato Province, in what is now Kashihara in Nara Prefecture. Counted with Unebi and Miminashi as one of the three mountains of Yamato, it was held sacred, and was said to have descended from heaven.
The occasion was the set topic of the beginning of spring. The model is a poem in Book Ten of the Man'yoshu, from the Kakinomoto no Hitomaro collection, in which mist trailing over Ama-no-Kaguyama at evening tells the poet that spring has begun.
In the sequence, the first poem declares outright that spring has come to a village on the ground; this one infers that spring must have come to the sky. Together the two form the opening of the collection.

The opening word describes both the faint paling of dawn and the faint trailing of mist, and its softness spreads over the whole poem.
In the second line an emphatic particle points hard at the word for sky and carries forward to the verb in the third line. Spring, the poem holds, has arrived in the heavens before it arrives below.
The third line is a contracted form joining a perfect auxiliary to an auxiliary of inference. That inference rests on visible evidence, and the evidence is supplied by the final line.
The fourth line takes the model poem's words unchanged, and is the pivot of the allusion. Yet where the model looks at the mountain in the evening, this poem moves the hour to daybreak, and in that shift lies the work of remaking.
The poem closes on a plain verb in the conclusive form. From the mist that can be seen on Kaguyama it reasons toward a spring that cannot be seen at all, and the gaze widens from a single landscape to the turning of the season itself.

Author

Go-Toba In

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other