Ima sakura sakinu to miete usugumori haru ni kasumeru yo no keshiki kana

English Translation

Now the cherry trees
seem to have opened, and now
a thin cloud has come
and the whole look of the world
has hazed over into spring

Meaning

Just now the cherries seem to have opened; the sky has thinned to cloud, and the whole world has the hazed look of spring.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 83

Headnote: from the hundred-poem sequence she presented.
The fifth poem in the run on cherry blossom. It catches the moment of opening and reads it as a change in the whole air of things. The headnote refers to the Shoji sequences of 1200.
This is Princess Shokushi's third appearance in the book, after the third and fifty-second poems.
The time is the day the cherries begin to open; no place is given.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.

The first line means just now, at this moment, and fixes the time sharply.
A perfect auxiliary in the second line is followed by a verb of seeming: it looks as though they have opened. Nothing is asserted outright.
The third line gives the state of the sky, which alters in step with the blossom.
The fourth line brings in haze and reaches down to the final noun, a word meaning look, air, appearance.
What distinguishes the poem is that it takes not one tree or one view but the world itself as its object. The opening of the cherries changes how everything looks. The poet who in the third poem watched a single dripping point in the mountains here widens her field as far as it will go.

Author

Princess Shokushi

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other