梅の花飽かぬ色香も昔にて
同じ形見の春の夜の月
同じ形見の春の夜の月
- Roma-ji
-
Ume no hana akanu iroka mo mukashi nite onaji katami no haru no yo no tsuki
- English Translation
-
The plum's colour and
its scent I cannot tire of
are as they once were
and the moon of a spring night
is the same keepsake as then
- Meaning
- The colour and scent of the plum, of which I never tire, are as they were long ago, and this spring moon is the same keepsake still.
- Commentary
-
Book One Spring Poems I 47
Headnote: as in the preceding poem, for the contest in fifteen hundred rounds.
The fourth poem joining plum scent to the moon, and the close of that run. It comes from the same contest as the previous poem and draws on the same model by Narihira, but it takes the side of what does not change. The original gives no fresh headnote.
The poet, known as the daughter of Shunzei, was in fact his granddaughter and his adopted daughter. Her father was Fujiwara no Moriyori and her mother Shunzei's daughter. She was active in Go-Toba's circle, and twenty-nine of her poems entered the Shin Kokin Wakashu.
The time is a night in the plum season; no place is given.
The occasion was submission to the contest.
The model is Narihira's poem in the Kokin Wakashu asking whether the moon and the spring are not what they were, while he alone remains himself.
The verb in the second line means never to have one's fill of a thing. Colour and scent stand side by side, sight and smell together.
The third line, a copula in the conjunctive with a connective particle, says: being as they were of old.
The word in the fourth line names something kept as a token of remembrance, the same word used in the fourteenth poem. Plum and moon alike are taken as one keepsake of days gone.
The poem closes on a noun, the same noun that ends the twenty-third and fortieth poems, its third appearance in this book.
Narihira's poem laments that neither moon nor spring is what it was. This one turns that over and insists that colour, scent and moon are all unchanged. By asserting constancy it throws into relief the one thing that has altered, the speaker herself, so that the older poem's grief is not denied but left standing.
- Author
- The Daughter of Fujiwara no Shunzei
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- In the plum's fragrance I ask after the old days and the moon of spring gives no answer, only casts its light down onto my sleeve
- Whose sleeve was it brushed the plum flower, leaving this scent I would like to ask of the moon, and of whether the spring is the old spring still
- Likening it to one I have never yet seen I looked at the plum and once its flowers have gone there will be no comfort left
- Every spring my heart is dyed into the branches of these flowers here and whose careless, idle sleeve is it that has brushed them now