Haru fukaku tazune irusa no yama no ha ni hono mishi kumo no iro zo nokoreru

English Translation

Deep into the spring
I went seeking, and at last
on the ridge's edge
the colour of that faint cloud
I glimpsed is lingering still

Meaning

Late in the spring I went in searching, and on the ridge the colour of the cloud I barely glimpsed is lingering yet.

Commentary

Book Two Spring Poems II 156

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, for the contest in fifteen hundred rounds.
After the fall of the blossom, only the colour of cloud is left along a ridge. The original gives no fresh headnote.
The poet, given by his court title, is Saionji no Kintsune, who later rose to Chancellor and, through his connections with the Kamakura shogunate, to great power. In Book One he is the poet of the seventy-second poem.
The time is near the end of spring; the place is within sight of a mountain ridge.
The occasion was submission to the contest.

The first line means that spring has deepened: its end is near.
The second line is a pivot, holding at once the verb for going in to search and the name of a mountain; the word also means the time of entering. Verb and place name are carried in one phrase.
The word in the third line means the line where a mountain meets the sky, used also in Masatsune's ninety-fourth poem in Book One.
The fourth line means faintly seen, with a past auxiliary in the attributive form marking it as something once glimpsed.
An emphatic particle governs the attributive form at the close. The flowers are gone and only the cloud's colour is left on the ridge. It is the subject of Tsunenobu's hundred and forty-eighth poem, on an image that will not leave; there it was the sky and here the ridge. The poem that follows ends on the same verb, and the two stand together.

Author

Fujiwara no Kintsune

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other