Tokiwa naru yama no iwane ni musu koke no somenu midori ni harusame zo furu

English Translation

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

Meaning

On the moss that grows at the foot of the unchanging rocks, on a green that no dyeing made, the spring rain is falling.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 66

Headnote: from the time when he presented a hundred-poem sequence.
The third poem in the run on spring rain. Where the previous poem made the rain a dyer of mountains, this one brings forward moss whose green no dye can alter. The headnote refers to the Shoji sequences of 1200.
The poet, given as Regent and Chancellor, is Fujiwara no Yoshitsune; this is his fifth appearance in the book, after the first, twenty-third, sixty-first and sixty-second poems.
The time is the season of spring rain; the place is among rocks in the hills.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.

The first line means everlasting, unchanging, and marks the moss as evergreen: its colour owes nothing to the season.
The second line names the foot of the rocks, and the verb in the third means to grow thickly.
A negative auxiliary in the attributive form gives a green that was never dyed. Ise's poem before this made the rain the dyer of the hills; this one answers by denying it, and the two stand together on that one verb.
An emphatic particle governs the verb at the close. On a colour it cannot alter, the rain falls all the same, and describing what the rain cannot do makes its presence felt the more.
Setting the unchanging against the passing recalls Shunzei's sixteenth poem on the aged pines.

Author

Fujiwara no Yoshitsune

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other