訪めこかし梅盛りなる我が宿を
疎きも人は折にこそよれ
疎きも人は折にこそよれ
- Roma-ji
-
Tomeko kashi ume sakari naru waga yado o utoki mo hito wa ori ni koso yore
- English Translation
-
Come and seek me out
my house where the plum's in bloom
for even coldness
between people is a thing
that depends upon the time
- Meaning
- Come and look for me, at this house of mine where the plum is at its height; whether people are distant or not is only a matter of the season.
- Commentary
-
Book One Spring Poems I 51
Headnote: topic unknown.
Placed in the latter part of the run on plum, this poem states the wish to show the flowers to someone. Where the forty-second poem spoke from the side of one who goes to another's hedge, this one speaks from the side of the one who is visited, and the two make a pair. The headnote gives no topic and nothing is known of the circumstances.
This is Saigyo's third appearance in the book, after the seventh and twenty-seventh poems.
The time is the height of the plum season; the place is the poet's own dwelling.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The particle closing the first line expresses a wish: I should like you to come. The poem opens on an address.
The second and third lines give the reason, and the reason is one thing only: the plum is at its best.
The fourth line concedes that the two are not close, granting the distance in advance.
An emphatic particle governs the concessive verb at the end. The conclusion is that everything depends on the season, and so the distance is no bar to coming now.
There is a contradiction in a man who has left the world calling someone to him so that flowers may be seen, and the poem lives on it. The same poet who wrote of a thawing river in the twenty-seventh piece here shows something close to loneliness for company.
- Author
- The Monk Saigyo
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- The wind that scatters the plum, has it too come through and blown across here for this fragrant snow of mine falls in disorder on sleeves
- Though this day I gazed should become a thing long past do not forget me you plum tree at my eaves' edge do not ever let me go
- Once it has fallen only the fragrance is left and as if the plum were still there, over my sleeve the wind of the spring blows on