Tsukuzuku to haru no nagame no sabishiki wa shinobu ni tsutau noki no tamamizu

English Translation

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

Meaning

What is loneliest, as I sit gazing through the long spring rain, is the water running down the fern at the eaves, drop by shining drop.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 64

Headnote: on the theme of spring rain in quietness.
Here begins the run on spring rain. The poem finds its loneliness in one small thing, the sound and the falling of water. The topic named is spring rain amid stillness.
The poet, given as Archbishop, is Gyokei (1101-1165), a monk of the late Heian period who rose to that rank.
The time is the season of the long spring rains; the place is beneath the eaves.
The occasion was the set topic.

The first line is an adverb meaning steadily, intently.
The word in the second line means to gaze while lost in thought, and it is a homophone for long rain, so that both senses are present: brooding, and watching the rain of spring.
The third line asks what the loneliness consists in, and the lower lines answer.
The word in the fourth line is a fern that grows at eaves, and it carries the sound of the verb to remember, so that thinking of what is past sounds through it.
The poem closes on a noun. The jewel-like water named there is the same word that ends Princess Shokushi's third poem, where it meant snowmelt; here it is rain, and the season's progress is marked by the return of one word.

Author

Gyokei

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other