Asagasumi fukaku miyuru ya keburi tatsu Muro no Yashima no watari naruramu

English Translation

The morning haze there
does it seem to lie so deep
because the smoke climbs
about the crossing places
of Muro no Yashima

Meaning

Is it because the morning haze lies so deep that this must be the neighbourhood of Muro no Yashima, where they say smoke rises from the water?

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 34

Headnote: from the time when he presented a hundred-poem sequence to Retired Emperor Sutoku.
Smoke and haze again, following the previous poem; but here the smoke is not Fuji's. The poet invokes Muro no Yashima, where smoke was said to rise from the water, and uses it to account for the depth of the haze. The headnote points to the Kyuan sequences of 1150.
Fujiwara no Kiyosuke (1104-1177), a son of Fujiwara no Akisuke, inherited the poetics of the Rokujo house. He wrote treatises on poetry and stood at the centre of the scholarship of his day.
The time is a spring morning; the place is Muro no Yashima in Shimotsuke Province, a famous poetic site in what is now Tochigi city. Smoke was said to rise from its waters, and it was written of as a place of smoke.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.

An interrogative particle in the second line governs the attributive verb at the close. The poem opens by asking why the haze should lie so deep.
The third line uses the fixed phrase attached to Muro no Yashima, which serves as a marker for the place.
The auxiliary at the end expresses present conjecture: this must be that neighbourhood.
The supposition is that what looks like deep haze is in fact the smoke of Muro no Yashima. Where the previous poem melted smoke into haze, this one joins them by mistaking one for the other: the same material, handled another way.
The poet is not looking at the place. He reasons toward a distant scene from a famous tradition, and the poem rests on knowledge of poetic sites.

Author

Fujiwara no Kiyosuke

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other