Kasumi tatsu Sue no Matsuyama honobono to nami ni hanaruru yokogumo no sora

English Translation

The haze is rising
on Sue no Matsuyama
faintly, dimly now
parting away from the waves
a band of cloud in the sky

Meaning

Haze rises over Sue no Matsuyama, and in the first faint light a band of cloud draws away from the waves into the sky.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 37

Headnote: composed on the theme of a spring dawn, for a hundred-poem contest at the residence of the Regent and Chancellor.
Two poems on the spring dawn follow. This one is set at Sue no Matsuyama, a famous poetic site in the north, and describes the sea and sky at daybreak. The headnote places it at Yoshitsune's hundred-poem contest, the same gathering as the twenty-third poem.
The poet is Fujiwara no Ietaka, author of the seventeenth poem; this is his second appearance in the book.
The time is a spring daybreak; the place is Sue no Matsuyama in Mutsu Province, in present-day Tagajo in Miyagi Prefecture, a spot on the sea long used as an image of waves that never cross.
The occasion was the set topic of a spring dawn.

The first line gives the sign of spring and the second fixes the place. Since the eastern song in the Kokin Wakashu that swears the waves will cross Sue no Matsuyama sooner than the speaker's heart will change, the site had belonged to love poetry.
The third line describes the faint paling of dawn, the same word that opens the second poem of the anthology.
The fourth line shows the cloud drawing away from the waves at the horizon. The word for waves, inseparable from this place name, is turned from a lover's oath into an actual daybreak, and that is the work of the allusion.
The poem closes on a noun. The cloud named there is the long horizontal band that lies across a dawn sky.
The poem that follows ends on the same words, and the two are set together.

Author

Fujiwara no Ietaka

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other