Uguisu no namida no tsurara uchitokete furusu nagara ya haru o shiruramu

English Translation

The warbler's own tears
that hung in ice have now thawed
and though in old nests
still it may be that the bird
has come to know it is spring

Meaning

The icicles of the warbler's tears have thawed; and there in its old nest, without stirring, it must know that spring has come.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 31

Headnote: from the time when he presented a hundred-poem sequence.
This poem closes the run on the warbler. It imagines that the tears the bird shed through the winter had frozen into icicles, and that their thawing lets it know spring has come without leaving the nest at all. The headnote refers to the Shoji sequences of 1200.
Prince Koreakira (1179-1221) was the third son of Emperor Takakura and elder brother of Retired Emperor Go-Toba. He never came to the throne and gave himself to poetry.
The season is early spring; the place is the warbler's old nest.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.

The first two lines set out a wholly invented scene: tears shed by a warbler, frozen into icicles. The poem is built on the premise that a bird weeps.
The verb in the third line means both that ice thaws and that a heart softens. The literal melting of the icicles carries the bird's own easing with it.
The particle in the fourth line means while remaining so, without moving; an interrogative particle follows and governs the auxiliary at the close. The question is whether the bird can know the season without leaving its nest.
The final auxiliary expresses present conjecture: by now it must know. The poem ends by reasoning about the inward state of a creature it cannot see.
The seventeenth poem asked the wind to call the warbler out and the eighteenth showed it singing amid snow; this one enters the bird's mind as it sits in the nest. Across the run the vantage moves steadily from outside to inside.

Author

Prince Koreakira

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other