Ima wa tote tanomu no kari mo uchiwabinu oborozukiyo no akebono no sora

English Translation

Now, they cry, it's time
and the geese of the rice fields
grieve as they set out
under a misted spring moon
in the sky at break of day

Meaning

Now it is time, they seem to say, and the geese of the rice fields cry out forlornly under the veiled moon in the dawn sky.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 58

Headnote: for a hundred-poem contest at the residence of the Regent and Chancellor.
The poem stands at the turn from the run on the misted moon to the run on returning geese. The cries of geese leaving for the north are set against a dawn sky in which the veiled moon still hangs. The headnote places it at Yoshitsune's hundred-poem contest, the same gathering as the twenty-third and thirty-seventh poems.
The Monk Jakuren (c. 1139-1202), whose lay name was Fujiwara no Sadanaga, was a nephew of Fujiwara no Shunzei and became his adopted son before taking orders. He was appointed one of the compilers of the Shin Kokin Wakashu but died before it was finished.
The time is a spring daybreak; the place is beside rice fields.
The occasion was submission to the hundred-poem contest.

The first line quotes a parting word: now it is time. The cry of the geese is read as speech.
The word in the second line means the surface of the rice fields, but it also carries the sound of the verb to rely on, so that the geese are heard leaving the fields they had depended upon.
The verb in the third line means to feel forlorn or wretched; the prefix is merely rhythmic and the auxiliary marks completion.
The poem closes on nouns, holding together the veiled moon of the previous run and the daybreak of the next.
Likening departing geese to a human parting is an old device, but this poem gives it in three syllables and leaves the rest to the scene. Yoshitsune uses the same word for the rice fields in the sixty-first poem, and the two answer each other.

Author

The Monk Jakuren

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other