Kaze kayou nezame no sode no hana no ka ni kaoru makura no haru no yo no yume

English Translation

The wind comes across
and on my sleeve as I wake
the flowers' fragrance
is in the pillow, scenting
the dream of a night in spring

Meaning

The wind comes through, and the scent of the flowers on my sleeve as I wake has entered the pillow: a dream on a night in spring.

Commentary

Book Two Spring Poems II 112

Headnote: for the contest in fifteen hundred rounds.
The second poem on the scent of blossom. Where the previous poem took a robe under the trees by day, this one takes a bed at night and a sleeper surrounded by fragrance. The headnote assigns it to the contest in fifteen hundred rounds.
The poet, known as the daughter of Shunzei, was in fact his granddaughter and his adopted daughter. In Book One she is the poet of the forty-seventh poem.
The time is a spring night; the place is a bedchamber.
The occasion was submission to the contest.
The poem is among her best known and was taken up repeatedly by later critics.

The first line means that the wind comes through, so that the room is one with a gap or an opening: the flowers outside and the bed within are joined.
The second line gives the sleeve at the moment of waking. Waking in the night is a state linked in poetry with brooding.
The third line brings in the scent and reaches down to the pillow of the fourth, so that the fragrance travels from sleeve to pillow.
The poem closes on a noun. The phrase answers to the dream of a spring night in Teika's thirty-eighth poem, and varies the moon of a spring night that ends four poems in Book One.
Wind, sleeve, pillow and dream are strung together by a single particle with no break in the sentence. A state without clear outlines, scent mingled with dreaming, is conveyed by the syntax itself.

Author

The Daughter of Fujiwara no Shunzei

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other