幾年の春に心をつくしきぬ
あはれと思へみ吉野の花
あはれと思へみ吉野の花
- Roma-ji
-
Ikutose no haru ni kokoro o tsukushikinu aware to omoe Miyoshino no hana
- English Translation
-
How many springs now
have I worn my heart away
pity me for it
and think of me tenderly
you flowers of Yoshino
- Meaning
- How many springs have I spent my heart upon you? Have some pity for me, flowers of Yoshino.
- Commentary
-
Book Two Spring Poems II 100
Headnote: a spring poem for the contest in fifteen hundred rounds.
The second poem, following Go-Toba's at the head of the book. Where that poem gazed through a single day, this one speaks of years of springs given to the flowers, and the measure of time lengthens. The headnote assigns it to the contest in fifteen hundred rounds.
The poet, given by his court title, is Fujiwara no Shunzei, who appeared in Book One as the poet of the fifth, fifteenth, sixteenth and fifty-ninth poems. He is also the man whose ninetieth birthday the previous headnote records.
The time is the cherry season; the place is Yoshino in Yamato Province.
The occasion was submission to the contest. Shunzei sent in his poems for it in great old age, and speaking of many years of springs sets his own life behind the words.
The first line means: of how many years, a number beyond counting. The previous poem measured a single long day; this one measures years, and the two hand the theme of duration from one to the other.
The verb in the third line means to use up entirely, joined to a verb of coming: to have gone on doing so. The years spent exhausting his heart on flowers are set out.
The fourth line is an imperative address. The one addressed is the blossom of the final line: pity is asked of flowers rather than of people.
The poem closes on a noun, so that the one addressed comes last, in inversion. Yoshino is also the ground of Book One's opening poem, the place to which the anthology's spring poems return again and again.
Asking flowers to pity him recalls the fifty-second poem of Book One, in which Princess Shokushi asked the plum not to forget her. Address to something that cannot answer is used here again.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Shunzei
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- In the morning sun the mountain glows, and I take the cherry blossom for snow that will not melt off and lies there, indifferent
- Where the cherries bloom like the long-trailing tail of a far mountain bird the long, long day is not time enough to tire of that hue
- Counting up the years that have gone by, come to nothing I find they were springs and in every one of them the flowers gave me sorrow
- On the mountainside where the white clouds lie trailing the mountain cherries and which would I go and break could I tell which was the flower