Yoshinoyama hana ya sakari ni niouramu furusato saenu mine no shirayuki

English Translation

On Yoshino's slopes
are the flowers at their height
glowing even now
while here the old home has chilled
under white snow on the peak

Meaning

Are the flowers at their height on Yoshino now? Here the old village has turned cold under the white snow on the ridge.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 92

Headnote: topic unknown.
The fourteenth poem in the run on cherry blossom. Where the previous poem inferred distant blossom from white cloud, this one sets white snow before the eye and thinks of blossom far off: the same colour read in opposite directions. The headnote gives no topic and nothing is known of the circumstances.
Fujiwara no Iehira was a poet of the late Heian period.
The time is spring; the place is an old village where snow still lies, while the thought goes to Yoshino.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.

An interrogative particle in the second line governs the auxiliary in the attributive form at the end of the third.
That auxiliary expresses present conjecture: they must be in flower by now. The upper lines reason about a spring far away.
The verb in the fourth line means to be cold and clear, with a perfect auxiliary: the old village has grown cold, and stays so.
The poem closes on a noun, putting the cause of that cold at the end.
Distant blossom stands in the upper lines and snow close at hand in the lower, so that within one spring a place in flower and a place still frozen are set together. The ninety-first poem used whiteness as evidence for blossom; here whiteness works against it, and the colour is turned the other way.

Author

Fujiwara no Iehira

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other