Miyoshino no takane no sakura chirinikeri arashi mo shiroki haru no akebono

English Translation

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

Meaning

The cherries on the high ridge of Yoshino have fallen: at daybreak in spring even the storm wind is white.

Commentary

Book Two Spring Poems II 133

Headnote: for the place where Yoshino was painted on the sliding screens of the Saisho Shitenno-in.
The fourth poem on blossom scattered by storms, and the close of that run. The Saisho Shitenno-in was a chapel built by Go-Toba, and poems were written to accompany the paintings of famous places on its screens; this one belongs to the panel showing Yoshino.
The poet, given as Retired Emperor, is Go-Toba; this is his second appearance in this book, after the ninety-ninth poem.
The time is a spring daybreak; the place is the Yoshino of the painted screen.
The occasion was the writing of poems for the screens. The leading poets of the day were called on for that undertaking, and the retired sovereign contributed himself.

The first two lines give place and object. Yoshino appears in this book at the hundredth, hundred and fourteenth, hundred and twenty-first and hundred and thirty-second poems, the ground to which the spring poems keep returning.
An exclamatory auxiliary in the third line marks the recognition that they have gone.
The fourth line is the poem's point. The particle carries the sense of even the storm, and a wind that has no colour is said to be white. It is the conception of Kunaikyo's hundred and twenty-ninth poem, where the storm hazed; here it is stated flatly as whiteness.
The poem closes on a noun, the same close as Shunzei's hundred and fourteenth poem, its second appearance in this book. The white of the blossom, the white of the storm and the pallor of a dawn sky are laid together, so that a colourless brightness covers the whole.

Author

Go-Toba In

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other