Aruji o ba tare to mo wakazu haru wa tada kakine no ume o tazunete zo miru

English Translation

Whose garden it is
spring does not ask or make out
but simply goes on
seeking the plum at the hedge
and looking at it, no more

Meaning

Spring never troubles to learn whose house it is; it only comes seeking the plum at the hedge, and looks.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 42

Headnote: composed on the plum at a hedge.
The poem is about plum blossoming at someone else's hedge. The speaker's own behaviour, going to look at the flowers, is spoken of as though it were the behaviour of the season. The headnote gives the plum at a hedge as the topic.
Fujiwara no Atsuie was a poet of the late Heian period.
The time is the season of plum blossom; the place is the hedge of a house.
The occasion was the set topic of the plum at a hedge.

The first two lines mean that no attempt is made to find out who owns the house. The object particle is voiced, which adds emphasis.
With the third line spring becomes the subject. It is a person who goes to the hedge, but the poem assigns the act to the season.
An emphatic particle in the fourth line governs the attributive verb at the close. The attitude stated is one of caring for the flowers alone, with no interest in the house or the people in it.
Attending to plum in another's garden connects this poem to the forty-third, which asks whose sleeve the scent came from. The relation of inside and outside a hedge, of host and visitor, is set up here and carried on through the plum poems that follow.

Author

Fujiwara no Atsuie

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other