Isonokami furuki miyako o kite mireba mukashi kazashishi hana sakinikeri

English Translation

To the old city
of Isonokami now
I have come to look
and the flowers they once wore
in their hair have bloomed again

Meaning

Coming to the old capital at Isonokami to look, I find the flowers blooming that people once wore in their hair.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 88

Headnote: topic unknown.
The tenth poem in the run on cherry blossom. In a capital fallen into disuse, the flowers open as they always did. The headnote gives no topic and nothing is known of the circumstances.
The poet is recorded only as unknown.
The time is the cherry season; the place is Isonokami in Yamato, in what is now Tenri in Nara Prefecture. The old capital of the poem is Nara.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.

The first line is a pillow word attaching to the word for old, and at the same time a real place name, so that it does both kinds of work at once.
In the second line that same sound emerges as the adjective for old. The subject of the old capital, which has run through this book, appears again.
The third line shows that the poet has actually gone there. It belongs with the twenty-second poem, set on the plain of Kasuga in the same old country.
The verb in the fourth line means to wear a flower or a branch in the hair or on the cap, and it calls up the memory of people at their pleasure here when the place still flourished.
An exclamatory auxiliary ends the poem. The world has changed and the capital has aged, and only the flowers open as before. It is the pattern of the forty-seventh poem, which counted what does not change, set here against the ruin of a city.

Author

Unknown Poet

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

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