Hana mo mata wakaremu haru wa omoiide yo sakichiru tabi no kokorozukushi o

English Translation

Flowers, you as well
in the springs when we must part
remember me then
the pains I have taken through
each blooming and each falling

Meaning

Flowers, when the spring comes that parts us, remember this too: all the care I have spent on you, each time you opened and fell.

Commentary

Book Two Spring Poems II 143

Headnote: composed as a poem on blossom.
The fifth poem reading impermanence in the fall, and the close of that run. The poet asks the flowers to remember the care she has spent on them. The headnote gives blossom as the occasion.
Inpumon-in no Taifu served Princess Ryoshi, a daughter of Emperor Go-Shirakawa, known as Inpumon-in. In Book One she is the poet of the seventy-third poem.
The time is when the cherries fall; no place is given.
The occasion was the writing of a poem on blossom.

The particle in the first line carries the sense of the flowers as well as the speaker: grieving at partings is not human alone.
The auxiliary in the second line gives the spring that is to come and part them.
The third line is an imperative address. Princess Shokushi asked the plum not to forget her in the fifty-second poem of Book One and Yoshitsune told the geese not to forget in the sixty-first; asking remembrance of something that cannot answer recurs through this anthology.
The fourth line means each time they open and fall, using the idea of repetition found in the hundred and forty-first poem.
The poem closes on a noun reaching back to the imperative above. The word means spending one's heart, taking pains, brooding; it is the word of Shunzei's hundredth poem, on years of spring spent in that way, so that a phrase from the opening of this book returns at the close of the run.

Author

Inpumon-in no Taifu

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other