Harukaze no kasumi fukitoku taema yori midarete nabiku aoyagi no ito

English Translation

The wind of the spring
blows the haze apart, and through
the gaps that open
they trail out in disorder
the green willow's hanging threads

Meaning

The spring wind unpicks the haze, and through the gaps the willow's green threads trail out in disorder.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 73

Headnote: composed as a spring poem, at the time of a hundred-poem sequence.
The fifth poem in the run on willow. The previous poem saw green through the haze; this one sees the willows through gaps the wind has opened in it, and the two handle the same relation differently. The headnote assigns it to a hundred-poem sequence.
Inpumon-in no Taifu, whose dates are unrecorded, served Princess Ryoshi, daughter of Emperor Go-Shirakawa, known as Inpumon-in.
The time is spring; the place is where willows grow.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.

The verb in the second line means to blow apart, to unpick. Haze is treated as something matted that the wind loosens.
The third line gives the opening it makes. It is the arrangement of the thirty-fifth poem, looking through a narrow gap, repeated here.
The fourth line shows the branches swaying unevenly, answering to the unpicking above, so that the wind both loosens the haze and tangles the willow.
The poem closes on a noun. As in the sixty-eighth poem the willow is thread, and the verbs for unpicking and for tangling both belong to thread, so that the vocabulary of yarn runs through the whole.
In point of technique, the woven silk of the sixty-fifth poem and the straw matting of the seventy-first are followed here by thread: a line of poems that take spring in the language of cloth.

Author

Inpumon-in no Taifu

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other