いづれをか花とは分かむ古里の
春日の原にまだ消えぬ雪
春日の原にまだ消えぬ雪
- Roma-ji
-
Izure o ka hana to wa wakamu furusato no Kasuga no hara ni mada kienu yuki
- English Translation
-
Which of them, I ask
shall I take to be blossom
in the old village
on the wide plain of Kasuga
where snow has not yet melted
- Meaning
- Which am I to call the blossom? On the plain of Kasuga, in the old capital, the snow has not yet melted away.
- Commentary
-
Book One Spring Poems I 22
Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
Where the previous poem dismissed snow, this one returns to it and confesses that white snow and white blossom cannot be told apart. Set on Kasuga Moor, it also belongs with the run from the tenth to the thirteenth poems. The headnote carries over from the poem before.
Oshikochi no Mitsune, whose dates are unrecorded, was an early Heian poet and one of the compilers of the Kokin Wakashu. He is named beside Ki no Tsurayuki and counted among the thirty-six immortals of poetry.
The season is early spring; the place is the plain of Kasuga in Yamato Province. The old village of the poem is the former capital at Nara.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
An interrogative particle in the first line governs the verb in the attributive form at the end of the second: which am I to distinguish as blossom? The auxiliary expresses intention or fitness, and the whole is a statement of uncertainty.
The third line names an old capital, here Nara. The word for an old place, running through the anthology since its opening poem, again sets the scene on ground that has aged.
The fourth line gives the plain of Kasuga, the same ground as the poems on young herbs, so that a single place is written about again and again as the season advances.
The poem closes on a noun governed by a negative in the attributive form. What has been mistaken for blossom is disclosed only at the end: the question comes first and the answer last.
Mistaking snow for blossom is the device of the nineteenth poem as well, but there the reader was told to see it so, while here the speaker cannot tell at all. The two are placed as contrasting handlings of one subject.
- Author
- Oshikochi no Mitsune
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- At Makimuku the cypress grove is not yet clouded over, and on the field of little pines the light snow is falling still
- Would snow fall again at this late hour? Surely not for the shimmering of the burning day of spring has already come to be
- The sky even now will not haze over at all the wind bites and stings clouded with the threat of snow the moon on a night of spring
- The mountains are deep and its light is cold as yet this moon of the spring the sky has clouded over and the snow keeps on falling