花は散りその色となくながむれば
空しき空に春雨ぞ降る
空しき空に春雨ぞ降る
- Roma-ji
-
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
- Prev Poem
-
Furusato no hana no sakari wa suginuredo omokage saranu haru no sora kana
- Next Poem
-
Taga tani ka asu wa nokosamu yamazakura koborete nioe kyō no katami ni