Hana wa chiri sono iro to naku nagamureba munashiki sora ni harusame zo furu

English Translation

The flowers have gone
and gazing at no colour
in particular
through an emptiness of sky
the rain of the spring comes down

Meaning

The flowers have fallen, and as I gaze at nothing in particular, the spring rain is coming down through an empty sky.

Commentary

Book Two Spring Poems II 149

Headnote: from among a hundred poems.
This poem closes the run on the time after the flowers have gone. Gazing at a sky drained of colour, the poet finds the spring rain falling through it. The headnote assigns it to a hundred-poem sequence.
Princess Shokushi, a daughter of Emperor Go-Shirakawa, had served as High Priestess of the Kamo Shrine. This is her third appearance in this book, after the hundred and first and hundred and thirty-seventh poems. Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa, poet of the hundred and forty-sixth, was her father.
The time is the spring rains after the cherries have fallen; no place is given.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.

The first line states the fact and runs on without stopping.
The second line means: with no particular colour. While the flowers lasted there was colour; now nothing holds the eye.
The verb in the third line means to gaze while lost in thought, and is a homophone for long rain. The same play is used in Gyokei's sixty-fourth poem in Book One, and it answers to the rain in the last line.
The fourth line means a sky with nothing in it. The adjective is the one used of the empty branches in the hundred and forty-seventh poem; there it was boughs, here it is the sky.
An emphatic particle governs the verb at the close. Into a place without colour or shape, only thin rain is falling. The poem shows a scene in which nothing happens and never names what has been lost, and the absence stands the stronger for it.

Author

Princess Shokushi

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other