山高み岩根の桜散るときは
天の羽衣なづるとぞ見る
天の羽衣なづるとぞ見る
- Roma-ji
-
Yama takami iwane no sakura chiru toki wa ama no hagoromo nazuru to zo miru
- English Translation
-
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
- Meaning
- So high are the hills that when the cherries fall about the rocks I seem to see the robe of a heavenly being brushing across the stone.
- Commentary
-
Book Two Spring Poems II 131
Headnote: a spring poem from the time when a hundred-poem sequence was called for.
The second poem on blossom scattered by storms. It opens with the same line as the poem before but sees the falling flowers as the robe of a heavenly being. The headnote assigns it to a hundred-poem sequence.
Retired Emperor Sutoku (1119-1164) was the eldest son of Emperor Toba; defeated in the Hogen disturbance, he was exiled to Sanuki. In Book One he is the poet of the seventy-first poem.
The time is when the cherries fall; the place is among rocks high on a mountain.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
The first line repeats the previous poem's opening, and the two stand together.
The word in the second line means rock set in the ground, the foot of a rock; it is used in Yoshitsune's sixty-sixth poem in Book One.
The third line fixes the moment.
The fourth line names the feather robe of a heavenly being. Petals streaming across the stone are seen as that robe touching and passing.
The verb in the fifth line means to stroke, governed by an emphatic particle. A heavenly robe brushing a rock stands behind a Buddhist figure for an immense span of time, the age it would take such a robe to wear a great stone away. An instant of falling blossom carries that idea of duration.
The previous poem measured the fall by the quantity that could hide a moon; this one measures it by the lightness of a robe's touch, and the same event is handled in opposite ways.
- Author
- Retired Emperor Sutoku
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- Scattering, mingling the flowers from a distance on Yoshino's slopes are white cloud on the summit tossed and troubled by the storm
- On Yoshino's height the cherries on the high peak have fallen and gone and even the storm is white at the daybreak of the spring