山高み峰の嵐に散る花の
月に天霧る明け方の空
月に天霧る明け方の空
- Roma-ji
-
Yama takami mine no arashi ni chiru hana no tsuki ni amagiru akegata no sora
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- So high are the hills that the flowers, falling in the storm off the ridge, cloud the moon itself in the sky at daybreak.
- Commentary
-
Book Two Spring Poems II 130
Headnote: a spring poem from a hundred-poem sequence he presented.
A run on blossom scattered by storm winds begins here. This poem has the falling flowers thick enough to hide the moon. The headnote assigns it to a hundred-poem sequence.
Nijoin no Sanuki was a daughter of Minamoto no Yorimasa and served Emperor Nijo; she was later active in Go-Toba's circle as well.
The time is a spring daybreak; the place is a high mountain ridge.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
The first line, an adjective stem with a suffix, states a cause: because the hills are high. It is the construction of the hundred and twenty-second poem, and the poem that follows opens the same way.
The second line names the wind, a violent one coming down off a mountain.
The third line supplies the subject of the verb below.
The verb in the fourth line means for the whole sky to cloud over, the word also used in Nagaie's hundred and third poem. There haze took the colour of the flowers; here the falling flowers themselves cloud the sky.
The poem closes on a noun, gathering moon, blossom and storm into one dawn sky. Against the hundred and eighteenth and hundred and twenty-third poems, which showed petals heaped on the ground, this one shows them in the air, so that the same fall is divided between above and below.
- Author
- Nijoin no Sanuki
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- 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 and when the cherries scatter about the bare rock I see the robe of heaven brushing over it, and gone
- Scattering, mingling the flowers from a distance on Yoshino's slopes are white cloud on the summit tossed and troubled by the storm