白雲のたなびく山の山桜
いづれを花と行きて折らまし
いづれを花と行きて折らまし
- Roma-ji
-
Shirakumo no tanabiku yama no yamazakura izure o hana to yukite oramashi
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- On the mountain where the white clouds trail, the mountain cherries: which of them should I go and break, taking it for the flower?
- Commentary
-
Book Two Spring Poems II 102
Headnote: composed on the theme of looking toward blossom on a mountain, when he was Inner Minister.
A run of poems on cherries seen at a distance begins here. This one turns on the difficulty of telling white cloud from mountain cherry. The topic named is the sight of blossom on a mountain, and the poem was written while its author held the office of Inner Minister.
The poet, known by his office and residence, is Fujiwara no Morozane (1042-1101), a son of Fujiwara no Yorimichi who served as Regent and Chancellor. Yorimichi, the poet of the forty-first poem in Book One, was his father.
The time is the cherry season; the place is a mountain seen far off.
The occasion was the set topic.
The first line reaches down to the mountain of the second. Taking white cloud and blossom for one another is the device of the eighty-seventh, ninetieth and ninety-first poems of Book One.
The second and third lines give mountain cherries on a mountain the clouds trail across; repeating the word for mountain presses the place on the reader.
The fourth line asks which is the flower. The same phrasing occurs in Mitsune's twenty-second poem and Domyo's ninetieth in Book One, and belongs to the family of poems that confuse snow or cloud with blossom.
The auxiliary at the close expresses a hesitant intention: should I go and break one, or not? Where the ninetieth poem asked how someone had already told them apart and broken a branch, this poem is still hesitating before the act.
Though the topic is only to look, the poem imagines going and breaking a branch, and in that reach from the distance to the hand its wish shows.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Morozane
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
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- How many springs now have I worn my heart away pity me for it and think of me tenderly you flowers of Yoshino
- 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
- With the flowers' colour the haze that dims the whole sky rises and wanders till even the sky is bright with the mountain cherry bloom
- In the palace halls the courtiers must have leisure for with cherry sprays set in their hair, once again they have spent the day away