Kasugano no shitamoewataru kusa no ue ni tsurenaku miyuru haru no awayuki

English Translation

On Kasuga Moor
where the grass is budding through
upon the young blades
indifferent it appears
the faint snow of early spring

Meaning

Across Kasuga Moor the grass is coming up everywhere, and on it, taking no notice at all, lies the thin snow of spring.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 10

Headnote: composed on the theme of lingering snow, among a hundred poems presented in the reign of Emperor Horikawa.
From here the poems turn to young herbs and to Kasuga Moor. This one takes lingering snow for its subject and finds it still white above grass that has begun to sprout. The headnote places it among a hundred poems presented in Horikawa's reign, written to the assigned topic of snow that remains.
The poet, given by his court title, is Minamoto no Kunizane (1069-1111). A son of Minamoto no Akifusa, he rose to Provisional Middle Counsellor, was active in the poetic circle around Emperor Horikawa, and was also accomplished in music.
The season is early spring; the place is Kasuga Moor in Yamato Province, the area around the Kasuga Shrine in present-day Nara, long written of as a place for gathering young herbs.
The occasion was the set topic of lingering snow. The hundred poems in question were composed by sixteen poets to a single set of topics in Horikawa's reign, and are known as the Horikawa hundred-poem sequences.
That undertaking fixed the practice of composing to set topics and became the model for the hundred-poem sequences that followed.

The first line raises the name of a famous poetic site, and the second shows the grass coming up from below across the whole moor; the verb adds the sense of doing so everywhere.
The third line lifts the eye to the surface of the ground and hands the poem over to the snow below, setting green grass against white snow.
The adjective in the fourth line means unconcerned, taking no notice. The grass proclaims spring and the snow, indifferent, stays where it is: the snow is given a temperament of its own.
The poem closes on a noun. The thin snow named there is the light, quickly vanishing snow of spring. By calling it spring's rather than winter's, the poem grants that it lingers while denying that it still belongs to the old season.
Laying new grass and lingering snow over one another is also the device of Kunaikyo's poem on patches of melting snow among light and dark green, which appears as number 76 of this book.

Author

Minamoto no Kunizane

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other