Sakurabana yume ka utsutsu ka shirakumo no taete tsune naki mine no harukaze

English Translation

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

Meaning

Were the cherries a dream, or waking? The white clouds have gone, nothing holds, and the spring wind is on the peak.

Commentary

Book Two Spring Poems II 139

Headnote: from the time when he presented a fifty-poem sequence.
A run of poems that read impermanence in the fall of the blossom begins here. This is the first, asking whether the flowering was a dream or not. The headnote assigns it to a fifty-poem sequence.
Fujiwara no Ietaka was one of the compilers of the Shin Kokin Wakashu; this is his second appearance in this book, after the hundred and thirteenth poem.
The time is after the cherries have fallen; the place is a mountain ridge.
The occasion was the presentation of the fifty poems.

The first line names the object and the second puts the question, doubling the interrogative particle so that neither answer can be reached. It stands close to Teika's thirty-eighth poem in Book One, on the floating bridge of a spring night's dream, in blurring the edge between dreaming and waking.
The third line reaches down to the verb below. White cloud has served throughout this book as a figure for blossom, and here it may be read as the flowers themselves.
The adverb in the fourth line requires a negative and means not at all; the phrase that follows means that nothing lasts, that all is impermanent.
The poem closes on a noun. Only the wind that stripped the flowers is left. The question of dream and waking is never answered, and the poem ends with nothing but the word for impermanence set down.

Author

Fujiwara no Ietaka

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other