I mo yasuku nerarezarikeri haru no yo wa hana no chiru nomi yume ni mietsutsu

English Translation

Sleep would not come sound
and I could not rest at all
for on a spring night
there was nothing in my dreams
but the flowers falling down

Meaning

I could not sleep soundly at all: on a spring night my dreams held nothing but blossom falling.

Commentary

Book Two Spring Poems II 106

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
The third poem on time spent among the flowers. Where the previous poem gave an unforgettable night, this one gives a night without sleep, so that two poems take the same night from opposite sides. The original gives no fresh headnote.
Oshikochi no Mitsune was one of the compilers of the Kokin Wakashu. In Book One he is the poet of the twenty-second and sixty-eighth poems.
The time is a spring night; no place is given.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.

The word opening the poem means sleep, and the phrase means to sleep at ease.
The second line joins a potential auxiliary to a negative: he could not sleep. An exclamatory auxiliary adds the note of recognising it afterwards.
The third line stands where a reason would.
A limiting particle in the fourth line gives nothing but the falling. Nothing has fallen yet, and in the dream it falls without stopping.
A continuative particle closes the poem without a full stop. To dream while unable to sleep is a contradiction, and it gives a night of broken, shallow rest. Thinking of the fall while the flowers are still at their height leads on into the poems on scattering blossom that follow.

Author

Oshikochi no Mitsune

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other