Shirakumo no haru wa kasanete Tatsutayama Ogura no mine ni hana niou rashi

English Translation

The white clouds of spring
lie doubled over the hills
of Tatsuta, and
on the peak of Ogura
the blossom must be glowing

Meaning

Spring has laid its own white over the white clouds: on the peak of Ogura on Tatsuta the blossom must be out.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 91

Headnote: from the time when he presented a hundred-poem sequence.
The thirteenth poem in the run on cherry blossom, laying blossom over white cloud as the previous poem did. The headnote refers to the Shoji sequences of 1200.
This is Teika's fifth appearance in the book, after the thirty-eighth, fortieth, forty-fourth and sixty-third poems.
The time is the cherry season; the place is Tatsuta in Yamato and its peak of Ogura.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.

The first line gives actual cloud, and the second has spring laying a further white on top of it. Two kinds of whiteness form layers.
The third line fixes the place. Tatsuta has run through the eighty-fifth and ninetieth poems, and three pieces share the mountain.
The fourth line names Ogura, a place long written of in autumn poems for its maple leaves. Setting spring blossom there exchanges one season for another.
The auxiliary at the close expresses inference from evidence, and the evidence is the cloud of the first line. It is the construction of Go-Toba's second poem and Hideyoshi's twenty-sixth.
Layered whiteness, a season transposed onto a place name, and inference from evidence are all held in five lines, and the accumulation of device is characteristic of Teika.

Author

Fujiwara no Teika

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other