Takase sasu Mutsuda no yodo no yanagihara midori mo fukaku kasumu haru kana

English Translation

Poled by shallow boats
the still reach of Mutsuda
and the willow fields
their green is deep, and deeply
the spring lies hazed upon them

Meaning

Where the flat boats pole through the still water at Mutsuda, the willow fields stand deep in green and deep in the haze of spring.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 72

Headnote: composed on the theme of haze standing between the viewer and distant trees, for a contest in the third month of 1201.
The fourth poem in the run on willow. The topic named in the headnote is haze coming between the eye and trees far off, and the poem shows a stand of willows seen through it.
The poet, given by his court title, is Saionji no Kintsune (1171-1244). He later rose to Chancellor and, through his connections with the Kamakura shogunate, to great power.
The time is spring; the place is Mutsuda in Yamato Province, a famous poetic site at a ford on the Yoshino River where the current slackens.
The occasion was submission to a poetry contest held in the third month of 1201.

The first line names the flat boats that work the shallows and the poling of them: the poem opens on human work.
The second line fixes the place. The word used means a stretch where the current slows and stands.
The third line gives an expanse thick with willows, completing the distant view.
The particle in the fourth line carries the sense of the green as well, so that depth of haze and depth of green are laid over each other, with the one adjective governing both.
The final particle is exclamatory. Since the topic concerns haze that blocks the view, one would expect obscurity to be the subject; this poem says instead that the green shows deep through it. Where the thirty-fifth poem looked at the sun through a gap in the haze, this one looks at colour through the haze itself.

Author

Fujiwara no Kintsune

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other