花さそふ比良の山風吹きにけり
漕ぎ行く舟の跡見ゆるまで
漕ぎ行く舟の跡見ゆるまで
- Roma-ji
-
Hana sasou Hira no yamakaze fukinikeri kogiyuku fune no ato miyuru made
- English Translation
-
Calling the flowers
the wind off Hira has come
down and blown, until
the wake of the passing boat
can be seen upon the lake
- Meaning
- The wind off Hira has been through, calling the blossom down, until the track of a boat rowing away can be seen on the water.
- Commentary
-
Book Two Spring Poems II 128
Headnote: on blossom over a lake, among fifty poems presented.
The topic named is blossom above a lake, and the conceit is that petals lying on the water make the wake of a boat visible.
Kunaikyo was a lady-in-waiting to Retired Emperor Go-Toba and died young. In Book One she is the poet of the fourth and seventy-sixth poems.
The time is when the cherries fall; the place is Lake Biwa in Omi Province and Mount Hira, which rises along its western shore.
The occasion was the presentation of the fifty poems.
The first line, modifying the wind, means to call the flowers out and scatter them. It is the verb Ietaka used in the seventeenth poem of Book One, where the wind was asked to call out the warbler.
The second line fixes the place: a wind coming down off Hira onto the lake, so that mountain and water are joined in one line.
An exclamatory auxiliary in the third line marks the recognition, as in the hundred and eighteenth poem. In both, the wind is inferred from its effects rather than seen.
The fourth and fifth lines mark degree. Petals cover the surface so completely that the open water opened by a boat shows as a line. The quantity of blossom is conveyed by an indirect fact, the boat's track.
The unseen wind is reached through the petals and then through the wake, a double indirection; the method of the fourth and seventy-sixth poems in Book One, which turned on what can and cannot be seen, is at work here again.
- Author
- Kunaikyo
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- Coming out to look I have grown too used to them these flowers, and so the parting when they scatter is a grief I did not want
- If only there were some road other than my own garden's, in these hills for someone may come to ask whether the flowers have gone
- At Osaka, when the wind blows the blossom off the topmost branches the storm itself is hazing the cedar stand at the gate
- The hills are so high that in the storm off the peak the falling flowers cloud over the very moon in the sky at break of day