つらきかな移ろふまでに八重桜
訪へども言はで過ぐる心は
訪へども言はで過ぐる心は
- Roma-ji
-
Tsuraki kana utsurou made ni yaezakura toedomo iwade suguru kokoro wa
- English Translation
-
How hard you are, then
to have let the eightfold bloom
fade before you spoke
a heart that would visit it
but pass by and say nothing
- Meaning
- How unkind of you: to have let the double cherry fade without ever saying come, though you thought of asking.
- Commentary
-
Book Two Spring Poems II 138
Headnote: a reply.
This answers the previous poem, calling unkind a heart that never spoke until the flowers had faded: a light protest from the recipient.
Prince Koreakira (1179-1221) was the third son of Emperor Takakura and elder brother of Retired Emperor Go-Toba. He never came to the throne and gave himself to poetry. In Book One he is the poet of the thirty-first poem.
The season is that of the previous poem.
The occasion was the arrival of Princess Shokushi's branch and poem.
The adjective in the first line means hurt by another's coldness. An exclamatory particle follows, so that the feeling is stated first and its cause afterwards, in inversion.
The second line takes up the verb of fading from the previous poem. Returning the sender's own word is the practice of exchange, as in the hundred and thirty-sixth poem.
The third line likewise repeats her word.
The fourth line means: without ever saying come and see. Her poem went no further than wishing for a visitor, and he asks why she did not simply invite him.
The poem closes on a noun that reaches back to the adjective in the first line. What is called unkind is the failure to invite him, so that the pattern of the hundred and thirty-sixth poem, where Yoshitsune answered as the one not asked, is repeated in this pair as well.
- Author
- Prince Koreakira
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- Was it left behind for the one who was not asked that it lingers still the white snow of the blossom kept back from tomorrow's fall
- In eightfold splendour the cherry at my eaves' edge has begun to fade if only a visitor would come before the wind does
- Was the cherry bloom a dream, or was it waking and the white clouds gone and nothing on earth abides in the spring wind on the peak
- Does it not resent that while it fled this sad world the flower had wished that there might be a wind here to call it away with it