Chirinikeri aware urami no tare nareba hana no ato tou haru no yamakaze

English Translation

They have fallen, then
and whose is the bitterness
that it should come now
to call at the flowers' traces
this spring wind off the mountain

Meaning

They have fallen. And out of what grudge, against whom, does the spring wind off the mountain come back to visit the place where they were?

Commentary

Book Two Spring Poems II 155

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, for the contest in fifteen hundred rounds.
From the same contest as the poem before. The wind that scattered the flowers comes back to the place they stood, and the poem charges it with acting out a grudge. The original gives neither a fresh headnote nor a fresh attribution, which indicates the same poet.
The poet is the Monk Jakuren, as in the previous poem.
The time is after the cherries have fallen; the place is where they stood.
The occasion was submission to the contest.

The first line is a flat statement of fact, the same phrase that opens the third line of Go-Toba's hundred and thirty-third poem.
The exclamation in the second line functions as an interjection, as in Sanesada's hundred and forty-first poem.
The phrase that follows means: out of a grudge against whom. The wind's return is taken for the behaviour of someone settling a score.
The word in the fourth line means the aftermath, and also the place where a thing was. It is the word of the hundred and thirty-fourth poem, where no footprint remained, and of the hundred and forty-seventh, where the tracks had ceased, and it recurs through this book for the place the flowers have left.
The poem closes on the same noun as the hundred and forty-fourth and hundred and forty-fifth. Those entreated the wind; this one accuses it, so that the attitude to one listener is reversed. Three poems share an ending while moving from request to plea to reproach.

Author

The Monk Jakuren

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other