Kaze mase ni yuki wa furitsutsu shikasuga ni kasumi tanabiki haru wa kinikeri

English Translation

Mixed in with the wind
the snow keeps on falling still
and yet even so
the mist is trailing across
and spring has come after all

Meaning

Snow is still driving on the wind, and yet for all that the mist trails out across the sky, and spring has come.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 8

Headnote: topic unknown.
Snow and haze, the one belonging to winter and the other to spring, are set side by side in a single poem, which then concludes that spring has come regardless. It stands as a summing-up of the run of poems that have found spring in the middle of snow. The headnote gives no topic and nothing is known of the circumstances.
The poet is recorded only as unknown.
The time is shortly after the first day of spring; no place is given.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The poem derives from one in Book Ten of the Man'yoshu, in which snow falls mixed with wind and yet the haze trails and spring has arrived. The Shin Kokin Wakashu takes it with the final line altered to the more current phrasing.

The first line puts the snow in among the wind, so that it comes slanting.
A continuative particle in the second line keeps the snow falling without a break. So far the scene is entirely winter's.
The third line is an adverb meaning nonetheless, even so, and it is placed exactly at the poem's hinge. This one word joins the winter of the upper lines to the spring of the lower.
With the fourth line a sign of spring appears, and the poem closes on a plain declaration. What matters is that a contradictory scene, snow and haze at once, is held together by that single adverb.
The Man'yoshu original ends with an older verb for spring's arrival. The Shin Kokin Wakashu replaces it with the phrasing current in its own day, so that the same closing line already used in the anthology's first poem and in the fourth returns here once more.

Author

Unknown Poet

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other