Furitsumishi takane no miyuki tokenikeri Kiyotakigawa no mizu no shiranami

English Translation

The snow that had lain
piled deep on the highest peaks
has melted away
and down the Kiyotaki
the water breaks in white waves

Meaning

The snow heaped on the high peaks has melted at last: the Kiyotaki runs white with it.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 27

Headnote: composed as a spring poem.
Taking up the white waves of the previous poem, this one ends on the same words; but where those waves came from a rising sea tide, these are the waves of a river swollen with snowmelt. The headnote says only that it was written as a spring poem.
The poet is the Monk Saigyo, author of the seventh poem; this is his second appearance in the book.
The season is the time of the thaw; the place is the Kiyotaki River in Yamashiro Province, which runs through the hills northwest of the capital, beyond Saga, and joins the Oi River between close-standing slopes.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.

The first two lines describe snow that had lain heaped on the high peaks. The past auxiliary in the attributive form marks a state that no longer holds, and the prefix on the word for snow is honorific.
In the third line a perfect auxiliary and an exclamatory one together carry the sense of realization: so it has melted. The peaks themselves are not in view; the poet reads the thaw from the volume and the whiteness of the water.
The fourth and fifth lines close on a noun and supply the grounds of that reading. As in the twenty-sixth poem, the conjecture comes first and its evidence last.
In the seventh poem Saigyo caught the single instant at which ice between rocks began to give. Here that water has gathered until it runs a whole river white. Two poems by the same hand are set in this book as the beginning and the end of one thaw.

Author

The Monk Saigyo

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other