Kyō to ieba morokoshi made mo yuku haru o miyako ni nomi to omoikeru kana

English Translation

Since it is today
spring goes even to Cathay
yet all this while I
had thought that it came only
to the capital, no more

Meaning

Today the calendar turns, and spring travels as far as China itself; and I had thought all this while that it belonged to the capital alone.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 5

Headnote: composed on the theme of the first day of spring, among a hundred poems set by the former Regent and Chancellor, now a lay monk, when he was Minister of the Right.
Where the four preceding poems keep to landscapes within Japan, this one widens the view as far as China and says that spring crosses borders. The headnote names Fujiwara no Kanezane, and the poem belongs to a hundred-poem sequence he commissioned while he held the office of Minister of the Right.
The poet, given by his court title, is Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114-1204). A son of Fujiwara no Toshitada and the father of Fujiwara no Teika, he served as Master of the Empress Dowager's Household and later took orders under the name Shakua. He compiled the Senzai Wakashu, and his teaching on mystery and depth shaped the poetry of the generations that followed.
The time is the first day of spring. No place is described; instead the capital and China are set against each other.
The occasion was the assigned topic of the first day of spring.
Seventy-two of Shunzei's poems entered the Shin Kokin Wakashu, and his criticism and practice alike were carried on by Teika and the other poets of that circle.

The first line points to a single day in the calendar. The poem begins not from a scene but from an idea, the turning of the almanac.
The second line names China, the most distant foreign land then commonly spoken of, and by naming it stretches spring's reach to its furthest limit. A doubled particle adds the sense of even so far as that.
The particle closing the third line works against what follows, so that the sense runs: spring goes even there, and yet.
The fourth and fifth lines confess the poet's own mistake: he had taken spring to belong to the capital alone. The exclamatory ending gives the tone of a realization arriving only now.
The poem describes no landscape at all, holding spring in the abstractions of calendar and geography. The manner is close to that of Chinese verse, and it is set here in deliberate contrast with Kunaikyo's poem before it, which reads spring out of falling snow.

Author

Fujiwara no Shunzei

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other