Miwataseba yamamoto kasumu Minasegawa yūbe wa aki to nani omoikemu

English Translation

When I look across
the foot of the hills grows dim
by Minase's stream
why did I ever suppose
that evening belonged to fall

Meaning

Looking out, I see the hills hazed at their feet above the Minase River. Whatever made me think that evening was the season of autumn?

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 36

Headnote: composed on the theme of a spring prospect over a river district, when the men wrote Chinese poems to be matched against Japanese ones.
This poem comes from the same gathering and the same topic as the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth. It praises the view at a spring evening and sets aside the received idea that evening belongs to autumn.
The poet, given as Retired Emperor, is Go-Toba; this is his third appearance in the book, after the second and eighteenth poems.
The time is a spring evening; the place is the Minase River in Settsu Province, which runs through what is now Shimamoto and joins the Yodo. Go-Toba built a detached palace there and went often.
The occasion was the set topic of a spring prospect over a river district.
The poem is among the best known of Go-Toba's, and Minase came to be spoken of in connection with him.

The first line throws the view wide open, in deliberate contrast with the narrow gap of the thirty-fifth poem.
The second and third lines give the distance: haze along the foot of the hills, a river running below. A composition with height and depth is set down in one breath.
The fourth line names the received idea that evening is best in autumn, a view widely shared since the Pillow Book declared it.
The close pairs an interrogative adverb with an auxiliary of past conjecture: whatever made me think so? The tone is near to rhetorical question, and it asserts the beauty of a spring evening.
The upper lines describe and the lower lines overturn a convention, so that the concrete first half answers to a critical second. Of the three poems on this topic, only this one contains an argument.

Author

Go-Toba In

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other