帰る雁今はの心有明に
月と花との名こそ惜しけれ
月と花との名こそ惜しけれ
- Roma-ji
-
Kaeru kari ima wa no kokoro ariake ni tsuki to hana to no na koso oshikere
- English Translation
-
The geese going home
have the heart of a farewell
and by the dawn moon
it is the name of the moon
and the flowers I regret
- Meaning
- The geese depart with the thought that this is the end, and in the light of the lingering moon it is the names of moon and blossom that I find hard to give up.
- Commentary
-
Book One Spring Poems I 62
Headnote: from the time when he presented a hundred-poem sequence.
The fifth poem in the run on returning geese, and its close. Against the departing birds, the poem sets what remains behind, the moon and the blossom, and calls their names hard to relinquish. The original gives no fresh attribution, which indicates the same poet as before. The headnote refers to the Shoji sequences of 1200.
The poet is Fujiwara no Yoshitsune, as in the previous poem.
The time is a spring daybreak, with the moon still in the sky.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
The first line names the birds and the second takes up the parting phrase of the fifty-eighth poem: the thought that this is the end.
The word in the third line is the moon that stays in the sky after dawn. It fixes the hour of the departure and at the same time leads into the moon named below.
The fourth line names the two things left behind in this country, the beautiful things that remain when the geese are gone.
An emphatic particle governs the adjective in the concessive form at the close. To find the names of moon and blossom hard to give up is to regret, on the birds' behalf, that they go without seeing them, and also to wish to leave something worthy of those names.
The run on returning geese has moved through the birds' forlornness, the hearers' tears, their voices in the night and the call toward autumn, and settles here on the contrast between those who leave and those who stay. From here the poems turn to spring rain.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Yoshitsune
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- Home to their old land the wild geese are returning and the night grows late and lost among cloudy roads their voices can still be heard
- Do not forget us geese rising from the marshes beside the rice fields nor the wind in the rice leaves nor the evenings of autumn
- In a sky where frost went astray they drooped and hung and now on the wings of the wild geese going home the rain of the spring comes down
- Steadily gazing how lonely the spring rain looks where it comes trickling down through the fern at the eaves in beads of jewel-like water