梅が枝にもの憂きほどに散る雪を
花とも言はじ春の名立てに
花とも言はじ春の名立てに
- Roma-ji
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Ume ga e ni monouki hodo ni chiru yuki o hana to mo iwaji haru no nadate ni
- English Translation
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On the plum tree's branch
in a way that wearies me
the snow scatters down
I will not call it blossom
and give the spring a bad name
- Meaning
- Snow comes scattering down on the plum branches, more of it than I can bear; I will not call it blossom and put about a false report of spring.
- Commentary
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Book One Spring Poems I 28
Headnote: as in the preceding poem, treated as a spring poem.
Here begins a run on plum. The poem refuses, deliberately, to take the snow falling on plum branches for blossom. The nineteenth poem told us to see snow as blossom, the twenty-second could not tell the two apart, and this one declines to call it blossom at all: one conceit handled in three stages. The original gives no fresh headnote.
Minamoto no Shigeyuki (?-c. 1000) belonged to the Seiwa Genji and is counted among the thirty-six immortals of poetry. He travelled through the provinces, going as far as Mutsu in the north. His personal collection survives.
The season is the time of plum blossom; no place is given.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The adjective in the second line means reluctant, wearisome. The sheer quantity of falling snow is registered through a word for feeling.
The verb in the third line, to scatter, properly belongs to blossom; used of snow, it makes the confusion between them a matter of language as well as of sight.
The auxiliary in the fourth line expresses negative intention: I will not say so. The refusal of the conceit is stated outright.
The word closing the poem means to get something talked about, to give a thing a reputation. To call snow blossom would be to spread word of flowers that have not opened, and so to blacken the name of spring; the final particle marks that as the reason.
There is wit in denying, inside a poem, one of poetry's stock devices. There is craft too in opening a run on plum not with the flower itself but with the snow that counterfeits it.
- Author
- Minamoto no Shigeyuki
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
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