Nagametsuru kyō wa mukashi ni narinu tomo nokiba no ume wa ware o wasuru na

English Translation

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

Meaning

Though this day I have spent looking at you should become a thing of the past, plum at my eaves, do not forget me.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 52

Headnote: a spring poem, from the hundred-poem sequence she presented.
This poem closes the run on plum from the human side. Foreseeing that the present moment of looking will become the past, the speaker turns to the plum and asks not to be forgotten. The headnote refers to the Shoji sequences of 1200.
This is Princess Shokushi's second appearance in the book, after the third poem. A daughter of Emperor Go-Shirakawa, she had served as High Priestess of the Kamo Shrine.
The time is the plum season; the place is the eaves of her own house.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
She died in the year after composing that sequence, and later readers have taken the poem as a presentiment of her own death.

The first line, with a perfect auxiliary in the attributive form, means: this day I have spent gazing.
The particle at the end of the third line marks a concessive supposition: even if today becomes the past. The present, not yet over, is looked at as though it were already gone.
The fourth line names the one addressed. That it is a tree and not a person sharpens the poem's solitude.
The final particle forbids: do not. The plea ends aimed at something that cannot answer.
The run on plum has praised colour and scent; here it turns to asking the flower for remembrance. Poems by the same hand stand at the opening of the book and at the close of this run.

Author

Princess Shokushi

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other