Yoshinoyama kozo no shiori no michi kaete mada minu kata no hana o tazunemu

English Translation

On Yoshino's slopes
I shall change the marked pathway
of last year's going
and seek out the blossoming
on a side I have not seen

Meaning

On Yoshino I shall leave the path I marked last year and go looking for blossom on a side I have not seen.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 86

Headnote: composed as a poem on blossom.
The eighth poem in the run on cherry blossom. Where the previous poem called out to travellers, this one turns off the road and goes in. The headnote gives blossom as the topic.
This is Saigyo's fifth appearance in the book, after the seventh, twenty-seventh, fifty-first and seventy-ninth poems. He left a great many cherry poems and returned to Yoshino again and again.
The time is the cherry season; the place is Yoshino in Yamato Province, the same ground as the seventy-ninth poem, so that a poem of waiting there is followed by one of going to look.
The occasion was the set topic of blossom.

The first line raises the place and the second touches last year's memory. The word used means a branch broken to mark a way, and it tells us at once that this is a man who has gone into these hills many times.
The third line means deliberately leaving that marked path: what was seen before is not enough.
The fourth line names a quarter of the mountain not yet visited.
The auxiliary at the close expresses intention: I shall go and seek it.
To go back to the same hills year after year and each year want somewhere new is a stance of inexhaustible attachment. The poet who summoned a visitor in the fifty-first poem here goes up the mountain himself.

Author

The Monk Saigyo

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other