Shirurameya kasumi no sora o nagametsutsu hana mo niowanu haru o nageku to

English Translation

Can he know of it
that gazing at the hazed sky
I grieve for a spring
in which no blossom has come
to give the air its fragrance

Meaning

Does he know it, I wonder? That I sit gazing at a sky full of haze and grieving for a spring in which no blossom has opened.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 39

Headnote: composed in a year when the plum had not flowered by the second month.
The poem stands at the hinge between the run on haze and the run on plum. The headnote records a year in which the plum still had not bloomed when the second month came, and the poem states the grief of a spring without flowers as a complaint addressed to someone.
Nakatsukasa, whose dates are unrecorded, was a daughter of Prince Atsuyoshi, a son of Emperor Uda; her mother was the poet Ise. Her name comes from her father's office. She is counted among the thirty-six immortals of poetry.
The time is the second month, when plum should be in flower; no place is given.
The occasion was the actual fact that the second month had come with no blossom.

The first line joins an auxiliary of present conjecture in the concessive form to a rhetorical particle: does he know? He surely does not. Who is meant is never said, but someone the speaker cares for is implied.
The second and third lines show her gazing on and on at a sky that holds nothing but haze; a continuative particle keeps the looking going.
The particle in the fourth line carries the sense of even the blossom. Haze has come, and flowers have not, and the lack is what the line registers.
The final quotative particle reaches back to the first line in inversion, so that the sentence, he cannot know that I grieve, is only completed across the whole poem.
Where the preceding poems praised haze for itself, here haze serves as the background that makes the absence of blossom felt, and the poem carries the sequence over into the run on plum.

Author

Nakatsukasa

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other