空はなほ霞みもやらず風冴えて
雪気に曇る春の夜の月
雪気に曇る春の夜の月
- Roma-ji
-
Sora wa nao kasumi mo yarazu kaze saete yukige ni kumoru haru no yo no tsuki
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- The sky will not quite haze over, the wind is keen, and clouded with the promise of snow hangs the moon of a spring night.
- Commentary
-
Book One Spring Poems I 23
Headnote: composed on the theme of lingering cold, for a hundred-poem contest held at his residence.
Here begins a run on the moon of spring nights. The topic is the cold that lingers after the first day of spring, and the poem sets the moon in a sky that has not fully hazed and a wind that still bites. The headnote places it at a hundred-poem contest held at Yoshitsune's residence.
The poet, given as Regent and Chancellor, is Fujiwara no Yoshitsune, author of the opening poem; this is his second appearance in the book.
The season is early spring, after the turn of the year's first day of spring, at night; no place is given.
The occasion was the assigned topic of lingering cold.
Yoshitsune's residence hosted many poetic gatherings, hundred-poem contests among them, drawing Shunzei, Teika and Ietaka. The new manner of the Shin Kokin circle is held to have grown up there.
The verb in the second line means not to do a thing fully. The sky hazes, but not enough; the sign of spring is presented in an incomplete state.
The verb in the third line means to be cold and perfectly clear, and belongs to the vocabulary of winter. To the seeing of the first two lines it adds a sense of touch.
The fourth line names the look of a sky about to give snow. It is not haze but the coming of snow that clouds the air, and spring is pulled back toward winter.
The poem closes on a noun. Three negative conditions are stacked - not hazing, keen, clouded with snow - and only then is the moon set down, a spring moon that refuses to blur.
The moon of a spring night is conventionally a blurred one, and the poem's argument lies in deliberately setting that convention aside.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Yoshitsune
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
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- Would snow fall again at this late hour? Surely not for the shimmering of the burning day of spring has already come to be
- 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
- 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
- At Mishima Bay the frost is not yet dried off the blades of the reeds and yet enough to bud them the wind of spring has begun