Hana zo miru michi no shibakusa fumiwakete Yoshino no miya no haru no akebono

English Translation

It is flowers I see
pushing through the brushwood grass
that grows on the road
at the old Yoshino court
in the first light of the spring

Meaning

It is the blossom I have come to see, pushing through the scrub that has grown over the road to the Yoshino palace, at first light in spring.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 97

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, for the contest in fifteen hundred rounds.
The nineteenth poem in the run on cherry blossom. The poet pushes along an overgrown road to the site of an old detached palace and sees the blossom there at daybreak. The original gives no fresh headnote.
The poet, given by his rank, is Fujiwara no Sueyoshi, a poet of the late Heian period who reached the senior third rank.
The time is a spring daybreak; the place is the Yoshino palace in Yamato. A detached palace stood at Yoshino in ancient times, and its ruins were written of in verse; it is the memory of that palace which lies behind the opening poem's calling Yoshino an old village.
The occasion was submission to the contest.

An emphatic particle in the first line governs the attributive verb: it is the blossom I look at. The declaration comes first and the place and the way there follow, in inversion.
The second line names the scrub and grass grown over the road, and in one word tells us that nobody comes this way any more.
The third line means pushing the growth aside to get through. As with the rocks in the ninety-third poem, the labour of arriving is given in concrete terms.
The fourth line fixes the place. A ruined palace belongs with the old capital of the eighty-eighth poem and the old village of the ninety-fifth.
The poem closes on a noun. At the end of an overgrown road stands blossom in the light of dawn. The anthology's first poem announced the coming of spring to a village at Yoshino; this one meets the height of the blossom in the same place, and the beginning and the near-end of the book are tied to one ground.

Author

Fujiwara no Sueyoshi

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other