Omou dochi soko to mo shirazu yukikurenu hana no yado kase nobe no uguisu

English Translation

We who are like minds
not knowing where we have come
the day has grown dark
lend us your flowering house
you warbler of the meadows

Meaning

We came out together, friends of one mind, lost track of where we were, and the day has gone. Lend us a lodging among the flowers, warbler of the fields.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 82

Headnote: composed on the theme of an outing in the fields, for a hundred-poem contest at the residence of the Regent and Chancellor.
The fourth poem in the run on cherry blossom, on going out into the fields. The headnote places it at Yoshitsune's hundred-poem contest, the same gathering as the twenty-third, thirty-seventh and fifty-eighth poems.
This is Ietaka's fourth appearance in the book, after the seventeenth, thirty-seventh and forty-fifth poems.
The time is nightfall in spring; the place is a field in flower.
The occasion was the set topic of an outing in the fields.

The first line means companions of one mind. The poem opens with a party rather than a solitary figure.
The second line means without knowing where: less lost than absorbed, no longer attending to the place.
The third line says the day went dark while they walked.
The fourth line is an imperative, asking for the ground beneath the flowers as a lodging for the night.
The poem closes on a noun, so that the one addressed comes last, in inversion. The warbler is treated as master of the fields, whose leave must be asked. In the seventeenth poem Ietaka told the spring wind to call the warbler out; here he petitions the bird itself, the same poet reversing his standing with the same creature.

Author

Fujiwara no Ietaka

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other