Asahikage nioeru yama no sakurabana tsurenaku kienu yuki ka to zo miru

English Translation

In the morning sun
the mountain glows, and I take
the cherry blossom
for snow that will not melt off
and lies there, indifferent

Meaning

The cherry blossom on the mountain, glowing in the morning sun, might be snow that has stayed on unconcerned and will not melt.

Commentary

Book One Spring Poems I 98

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, for the contest in fifteen hundred rounds.
This poem closes Book One, Spring Poems I. Cherry blossom in the morning sun is mistaken for snow that has not melted away. The original gives no fresh headnote.
This is Ariie's third appearance in the book, after the fifty-third and seventy-fifth poems. He was one of the compilers of the Shin Kokin Wakashu.
The time is a spring morning; the place is a mountain in flower.
The occasion was submission to the contest.

The word in the first line means light, as it does in the forty-fourth and forty-fifth poems; here it is the light of the morning sun.
The verb in the second line means to shine with rich colour, used, as in Yorimichi's forty-first poem, of sight rather than smell.
The third line names the object.
The adjective in the fourth line means unconcerned, and a negative in the attributive form gives snow that has not melted. That same adjective was used of lingering snow in Kunizane's tenth poem, where the snow lay unconcerned above the new grass.
An emphatic particle governs the attributive verb at the close. The book began with poems looking for spring in the snow and has repeatedly treated snow and blossom as indistinguishable; it ends by mistaking blossom for snow. After the nineteenth poem, which told us to see snow as blossom, the twenty-second, which could not tell them apart, and the twenty-eighth, which refused to call snow a flower, the comparison is here reversed, and on that reversal the book closes.

Author

Fujiwara no Ariie

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other