Wakana tsumu sode to zo miyuru Kasugano no tobuhi no nobe no yuki no muragie

English Translation

Sleeves that pick young herbs
that is what they seem to be
on Kasuga Moor
out on the Tobuhi fields
the snow melting patch by patch

Meaning

They look for all the world like the sleeves of herb-gatherers: the patches of snow still unmelted out on the Tobuhi fields of Kasuga Moor.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 13

Headnote: a spring poem, from a hundred-poem sequence presented to Retired Emperor Sutoku.
This poem lays the two subjects of the preceding run, herb-gathering and lingering snow, one on top of the other, seeing in the unmelted patches the white sleeves of people scattered across a field. The headnote refers to the hundred-poem sequences presented to Retired Emperor Sutoku, the Kyuan sequences completed in 1150.
The poet, given as the former Consultant, is Fujiwara no Norinaga (1109-?). He rose to Consultant, was exiled for taking Sutoku's side in the Hogen disturbance, and afterwards took orders. He was learned in poetics and left commentaries of his own.
The season is early spring; the place is Tobuhi, a part of Kasuga Moor. The name records the signal fires once kept there, and the ground lies within what is now Nara Park.
The occasion was the spring topic of the hundred-poem sequence.
The Kyuan sequences, commissioned by Sutoku, drew in Shunzei and the other leading poets of the day, and stand as the representative undertaking of that period's poetic circle.

The first two lines announce the comparison, with an emphatic particle governing a verb of seeming. What the thing resembles is given first, and only in the lower lines is the thing itself named.
The third and fourth lines stack place names to narrow the ground: first the famous moor, then the smaller field within it.
The poem closes on a noun. The word names snow left in scattered patches, so that the field is mottled between white and bare earth. Those white flecks are what the poem takes for the sleeves of people gathering herbs.
In fact the field is empty and the whiteness is only snow. Reading human figures into it is the work of a mind looking for the season's activity in the landscape. Where the tenth poem held lingering snow at arm's length as something indifferent, this one lays a human shape over it: the same material, handled in opposite ways.

Author

Fujiwara no Norinaga

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other