春雨の降りそめしより青柳の
糸の緑ぞ色まさりける
糸の緑ぞ色まさりける
- Roma-ji
-
Harusame no furisomeshi yori aoyagi no ito no midori zo iro masarikeru
- English Translation
-
Since the rain of spring
first began to fall on it
the green willow's threads
have deepened, and their colour
has grown richer than before
- Meaning
- Since the spring rain began to fall, the green of the willow's thread-like branches has grown deeper than it was.
- Commentary
-
Book One Spring Poems I 68
Headnote: for a screen, in the Engi era.
The poem stands at the turn from spring rain to willow, holding that the rain deepens the willow's green and so joining the two runs. The headnote places it as a screen poem of Emperor Daigo's reign, written to accompany a painted scene.
This is Mitsune's second appearance in the book, after the twenty-second poem. He was one of the compilers of the Kokin Wakashu.
The time is the season of spring rain; the place is a waterside where willows grow.
The occasion was composition for a screen.
The verb in the second line means to begin to do a thing, with a past auxiliary in the attributive form. The moment the rain began is taken as a starting point, and what follows is the change since then.
The third and fourth lines see the thin trailing branches of the willow as threads. The comparison is an old one and recurs through the willow poems that follow.
An emphatic particle governs the attributive form at the close.
The final line says the colour has deepened, and an exclamatory auxiliary adds the note of noticing. The sixty-sixth poem described a green the rain could not dye; this one describes a green the rain has deepened, and the two are set side by side.
Ise's sixty-fifth poem supposed that the rain was dyeing the hills; this one asserts of a willow close at hand that its colour has in fact increased, so that the same subject moves from conjecture to confirmation.
- Author
- Oshikochi no Mitsune
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- It trails on the wind and so the spring has come now for on the roadway where the willow's shadow falls the people are lingering
- By the great river of Yoshino, the old grove of willows: no shade can be seen there yet, and still it has begun to feel spring