水の面に綾織り乱る春雨や
山の緑をなべて染むらん
山の緑をなべて染むらん
- Roma-ji
-
Mizu no omo ni aya orimidaru harusame ya yama no midori o nabete somuramu
- English Translation
-
On the water's face
it weaves and disorders silk
this rain of the spring
and does it dye all alike
the green upon the mountains
- Meaning
- The spring rain weaves and tangles a patterned silk across the water; is it dyeing the whole green of the mountains too?
- Commentary
-
Book One Spring Poems I 65
Headnote: a poem for the contest at the Empress's palace in the Kanpyo era.
The second poem in the run on spring rain. Where the previous poem kept to a single point beneath the eaves, this one opens out from a water surface to a whole mountainside. The headnote places it at a contest held at the Empress's palace in the reign of Emperor Uda.
Ise, whose dates are unrecorded, was a daughter of Fujiwara no Tsugukage, governor of Ise, and served the imperial consort Onshi under Emperor Uda. Nakatsukasa of the thirty-ninth poem was her daughter.
The time is the season of spring rain; the place is a waterside in view of mountains.
The occasion was submission to the contest.
The first two lines take raindrops striking water and describe the pattern they make as figured silk being woven and thrown into disorder. The word used names a patterned weave, so that what is seen is given in the language of cloth.
An interrogative particle in the third line governs the auxiliary at the close: what has been fact so far becomes conjecture from here.
With the fourth line the eye moves from the water to the mountains, from fine detail close at hand to a broad wash of colour far off, and the scale changes at a stroke.
The adverb at the close means uniformly, throughout. The verb for dyeing belongs to the vocabulary of weaving and answers to the first line, so that two stages of cloth-making, weaving and dyeing, are both assigned to the rain.
A visible pattern on water is used to reason toward an invisible colouring of the hills, the same movement from evidence to inference used in the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh poems.
- Author
- Ise
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- Unchanging always on the rock roots of the hills the moss is growing and on a green never dyed the rain of the spring comes down
- When the rain comes down the strong men of the rice fields have their leisure, then for the seedbed's water they leave to the sky to look to