桜散る春の山辺は憂かりけり
世を逃れにと来し甲斐もなく
世を逃れにと来し甲斐もなく
- Roma-ji
-
Sakura chiru haru no yamabe wa ukarikeri yo o nogare ni to koshi kai mo naku
- English Translation
-
Where the cherry falls
the spring hillside is a place
of misery too
and I fled the world for this
and it has done me no good
- Meaning
- The spring hillside where the cherries fall is a wretched place after all: I left the world and came here, and it has gained me nothing.
- Commentary
-
Book Two Spring Poems II 117
Headnote: topic unknown.
A man who has left the world finds that in the hills the blossom disturbs him all the same. The headnote gives no topic and nothing is known of the circumstances.
The Monk Egyo was a mid-Heian monk and poet.
The time is when the cherries fall; the place is a hillside.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The first two lines set the scene. The hills should be where one escapes the world, and there the blossom is falling.
The adjective in the third line means painful, unwelcome, and an exclamatory auxiliary marks the recognition. The flowers are treated not as beauty but as a disturbance.
The fourth line means: intending to escape the world. The circumstance of having taken orders and gone to the hills is disclosed here.
The closing line, without a full stop, leaves the poem hanging. The order is inverted, so that the reason for the complaint comes after it.
In Book One, Saigyo's fifty-first poem called a visitor to see his plum; the theme of a monk still moved by flowers appears here as a lament at not being free of them.
- Author
- The Monk Egyo
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- Fallen or not yet and what I cannot make out through the haze of spring is the cherry on the hills where the long cloud lies trailing
- At a mountain house come to see the spring evening I find that the bell of the sunset hour is rung and the flowers are falling
- Under the cherry the low wind has come to blow and at every root the snow lies in scattered drifts melting away in patches
- The rain of the spring falls steadily from the sky with no let-up, and in the tears that keep falling the flowers are falling too