わが宿の物なりながら桜花
散るをばえこそとどめざりけれ
散るをばえこそとどめざりけれ
- Roma-ji
-
Waga yado no mono nari nagara sakurabana chiru o ba e koso todomezarikere
- English Translation
-
Though it is a thing
belonging to my own house
the cherry blossom
when it falls I find I have
no power at all to stop it
- Meaning
- The cherry belongs to my own house, and still I have no power to hold it back from falling.
- Commentary
-
Book Two Spring Poems II 108
Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
The second poem on falling blossom. Where the previous poem took cherries on a mountain, this one takes the tree in the poet's own garden and finds that ownership is no help. The headnote carries over.
Ki no Tsurayuki compiled the Kokin Wakashu and wrote its Japanese preface. In Book One he is the poet of the fourteenth and eighty-first poems.
The time is when the cherries fall; the place is the poet's house.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The particle closing the second line is concessive: although it is mine. That possession and control are two different things is the argument on which the poem is built.
The third line names the object.
In the fourth line an adverb of impossibility, requiring a negative below, stands with an emphatic particle; the object particle is voiced, which adds force.
The concessive form at the close answers the emphatic particle, with a negative and an exclamatory auxiliary: I could not hold it, after all.
In Book One, Saigyo's fifty-first poem wished to show the plum of his own house and Hachijoin no Takakura's fifty-fourth watched it fall unvisited; here again the flowers are the poet's own. What is new is that the owner has no power over them.
- Author
- Ki no Tsurayuki
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- If the mountain bloom falls and is confused with snow let us put to spring the question of which of them is the flower, and let it say
- Where the haze is up on the hills at spring, is it that the cherry falls before we have had our fill that the warbler is crying
- Rain of the spring, do not come down so hard as this for the cherry flowers would be a loss to scatter before those who have not seen