Karigane no kaeru wa kaze ya sasouramu sugiyuku mine no hana mo nokoranu

English Translation

Is it the wind, then
that calls the wild geese homeward
for as they go by
not a flower is left behind
on the peaks they pass above

Meaning

Is it the wind that draws the geese away home? On the peaks they cross, not a flower is left.

Commentary

Book Two Spring Poems II 120

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
Falling blossom is joined to the geese returning north. The original gives neither a fresh headnote nor a fresh attribution, which indicates the same poet as before.
The poet is Minamoto no Shigeyuki, as in the previous poem.
The time is when the cherries fall; the place is the peaks the geese fly over.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.

The first two lines mean: as for the geese going home. The word used names their cry, and by extension the birds.
An interrogative particle in the second line governs the auxiliary at the end of the third.
That auxiliary expresses present conjecture, reasoning toward a cause: is it the wind that draws them off?
The fourth line names the peaks the birds pass over.
The poem ends flatly on a negative in the attributive form. The argument is that one wind both scatters the flowers and calls the geese, so that two absences are traced to a single cause. Book One had a run on returning geese from the fifty-eighth to the sixty-second poems, but without blossom; here the two are joined.

Author

Minamoto no Shigeyuki

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other