時しもあれたのむの雁の別れさへ
花散るころのみ吉野の里
花散るころのみ吉野の里
- Roma-ji
-
Toki shi mo are tanomu no kari no wakare sae hana chiru koro no Miyoshino no sato
- English Translation
-
Of all times, just now
even the geese of the fields
must take their leave here
when the blossom is falling
in the Yoshino village
- Meaning
- Of all times, it is now, when the blossom is falling, that the geese of the rice fields must leave us too, here in the village of Yoshino.
- Commentary
-
Book Two Spring Poems II 121
Headnote: a spring poem, from the time when a hundred-poem sequence was called for.
Falling blossom and returning geese again, following the previous poem; but here the complaint is that two partings fall in the same season. The headnote assigns it to a hundred-poem sequence.
Minamoto no Tomochika was a son of Minamoto no Moromitsu. In Book One he is the poet of the fifty-seventh poem; Kunaikyo of the fourth and seventy-sixth was his sister.
The time is when the cherries fall; the place is the village of Yoshino in Yamato Province.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
The first line means: of all the times there might have been. It is a phrase of complaint, with an emphatic particle.
The word in the second line means the surface of the rice fields and also carries the sound of the verb to rely on. It is used in Jakuren's fifty-eighth poem and Yoshitsune's sixty-first in Book One, so that three poems share it.
The particle in the third line marks addition: besides the parting from the flowers, the parting from the geese as well. Two farewells are made to coincide in one word.
The fourth line reaches down to the village below.
The poem closes on a noun. Yoshino has recurred since the opening poem of Book One and appears in this book at the hundredth and hundred and fourteenth poems; here it is set as the place where partings gather.
- Author
- Minamoto no Tomochika
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- 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
- The hills are so deep that the stands of cedar there are lost from my sight in the wind off the summit the flowers are scattering
- Under the branches until the green of the moss is lost from my sight they have fallen and lie deep the mountain cherry blossoms