Ama no hara Fuji no keburi no haru no iro no kasumi ni nabiku akebono no sora

English Translation

The plain of heaven
the smoke of Fuji rising
the colour of spring
trailing off into the haze
the sky at break of morning

Meaning

Across the wide sky the smoke of Fuji has become the colour of spring, trailing out as haze in the light of dawn.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 33

Headnote: from the time when he presented a hundred-poem sequence.
Here begins a run on haze. This poem takes the smoke of Fuji and lets it merge with spring haze across the sky at first light. The headnote refers to the Shoji sequences of 1200.
The poet, given as former Archbishop, is Jien (1155-1225), a son of the Regent Fujiwara no Tadamichi and an uncle of Yoshitsune. He served four times as abbot of the Tendai school and wrote the historical work Gukansho.
The time is a spring dawn; the sky is one in which Fuji can be seen far off. In that age the mountain was still smoking.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
Ninety-two of Jien's poems entered the Shin Kokin Wakashu, second only to Saigyo.

The first line names the wide plain of the sky, so that the poem opens on sheer extent.
Through the second and third lines a single particle is repeated, carrying the eye from smoke to colour to haze. The repetition smooths the movement and blurs the boundary between the smoke and the mist.
In the fourth line the smoke becomes haze outright. Something with no season of its own is absorbed into the chief sign of spring.
The poem closes on a noun. Putting the hour last fixes the scene: smoke and haze dissolving into one another in half-light.
The poem that follows also joins smoke and haze, and the two are placed together.

Author

Jien

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other