Usuku koki nobe no midori no wakakusa ni ato made miyuru yuki no muragie

English Translation

Pale here, deeper there
in the green of the young grass
out across the moor
even their tracks can be seen
the patches of melting snow

Meaning

The young grass across the moor is green, pale in places and deeper in others: even the marks are still visible where the snow lay and melted unevenly.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 76

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, a spring poem for the contest in fifteen hundred rounds.
Leaving the willow behind, the poem turns to young grass and lingering snow. As noted with the fourth poem, this is one of Kunaikyo's best-known pieces and stands as the counterpart to that one. The original gives no fresh headnote.
This is Kunaikyo's second appearance in the book, after the fourth poem. She was a lady-in-waiting to Retired Emperor Go-Toba and died young.
The time is early spring; the place is a moor where snow still lies.
The occasion was submission to the contest.
The poem is said to have won her Go-Toba's high regard.

The first line means pale in some places and deep in others, taking the uneven growth of the grass as a gradation of colour.
The second and third lines fix the object. The variation in green is stated first, and its cause is disclosed below.
The fourth line says that even the marks remain visible. Where the snow lay thick the grass came late, and where it lay thin the grass came early, and that difference has stayed on the ground as a difference of green: the poem is an observation.
The close is a noun naming snow that has melted away in patches, the word also used in Norinaga's thirteenth poem.
The fourth poem found spring by tracks that could not be seen; this one finds the departed winter by tracks that can. Two poems by one hand stand as positive and negative of each other, one in the earlier half of the book and one in the later.

Author

Kunaikyo

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other