逢坂や梢の花を吹くからに
嵐ぞ霞む関の杉むら
嵐ぞ霞む関の杉むら
- Roma-ji
-
Ōsaka ya kozue no hana o fuku kara ni arashi zo kasumu seki no sugimura
- English Translation
-
At Osaka, when
the wind blows the blossom off
the topmost branches
the storm itself is hazing
the cedar stand at the gate
- Meaning
- At Osaka, no sooner does the wind take the blossom from the branch-tips than the storm itself goes hazy about the cedars by the barrier.
- Commentary
-
Book Two Spring Poems II 129
Headnote: on blossom by a barrier road.
The topic named is blossom on the road at a barrier. The poem belongs to the same set of fifty as the one before, and the original gives no fresh attribution, which indicates the same poet.
The poet is Kunaikyo, as in the previous poem.
The time is when the cherries fall; the place is the barrier at Osaka on the border of Yamashiro and Omi. It is the ground of Go-Toba's eighteenth poem in Book One, written on the topic of a warbler at that barrier, and the two topics correspond.
The occasion was the presentation of the fifty poems.
The first line raises the place name with an exclamatory particle.
The second line names the object.
The construction closing the third line means: no sooner than. The blowing and the hazing follow one another without interval.
An emphatic particle in the fourth line governs the attributive verb. What hazes is not the landscape but the storm itself: petals lifted into the air make the wind visible and white. The unseen wind is caught through the petals, the method of the previous poem, used here in the air rather than on water.
The poem closes on a noun. Dark cedar behind the drifting white sets it off. In Go-Toba's eighteenth poem the cedar needles at Osaka were whitened by snow; here they are hazed by blossom, and the same trees at the same barrier appear one season further on.
- Author
- Kunaikyo
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
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Hana sasou Hira no yamakaze fukinikeri kogiyuku fune no ato miyuru made
- Next Poem
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Yama takami mine no arashi ni chiru hana no tsuki ni amagiru akegata no sora