岩そそぐ垂水の上のさわらびの
萌え出づる春になりにけるかな
萌え出づる春になりにけるかな
- Roma-ji
-
Iwa sosoku tarumi no ue no sawarabi no moeizuru haru ni narinikeru kana
- English Translation
-
Over splashing rocks
above the cascading fall
the young bracken shoots
are pushing up: it has turned
to spring at last, has it not
- Meaning
- Beside the water that comes pouring over the rocks, the young bracken is putting out its shoots. Spring has come after all.
- Commentary
-
Book One Spring Poems I 32
Headnote: topic unknown.
After the runs on plum and on the warbler, a poem celebrating the arrival of spring outright. From one small sight, bracken shoots beside a fall of water, comes a plain delight in the season itself. The headnote gives no topic and nothing is known of the circumstances.
Prince Shiki (?-716) was a son of Emperor Tenji. He kept clear of the political struggles of his day. His own son came to the throne as Emperor Konin, and the imperial line passed thereafter to that branch.
The season is early spring; the place is beside water falling among rocks.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The poem is preserved in Book Eight of the Man'yoshu under Prince Shiki's name, and the Shin Kokin Wakashu takes it from there.
The first line describes water pouring over rock. The movement at the centre of the scene comes first.
The word in the second line means falling water, a cascade, and the phrase places the poem at its edge.
The third line names bracken just breaking the ground; the prefix is merely decorative. Soft new growth is set beside the hard, cold matter of rock and water, and the contrast is the poem's whole picture.
The fourth line defines spring as the season in which bracken sprouts. The year is fixed not by the calendar but by a single fact in front of the eyes.
The close stacks a perfect auxiliary, an exclamatory one and a final exclamatory particle, so that the feeling is pressed hard forward. Plain statement of a plain sight, without device, makes a strong contrast with the highly worked poems that open the book; placing Man'yoshu pieces here gives the sequence its variation.
- Author
- Prince Shiki
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- On the plum tree's branch singing, moving as it goes the warbler; and now over its wings shining white the light snow is falling still
- 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
- The plain of heaven the smoke of Fuji rising the colour of spring trailing off into the haze the sky at break of morning
- The morning haze there does it seem to lie so deep because the smoke climbs about the crossing places of Muro no Yashima