吉野川岸の山吹咲きにけり
峰の桜は散り果てぬらん
峰の桜は散り果てぬらん
- Roma-ji
-
Yoshinogawa kishi no yamabuki sakinikeri mine no sakura wa chirihatenuramu
- English Translation
-
By Yoshino's stream
the kerria on the bank
has come into flower
and the cherry on the peak
must have fallen, every one
- Meaning
- The kerria has opened along the bank of the Yoshino; the cherry on the ridge must have fallen to the last flower.
- Commentary
-
Book Two Spring Poems II 158
Headnote: as in the preceding poem, from the time when he presented a hundred-poem sequence.
A run on kerria begins here. At its entrance, this poem reasons from the opening of the kerria on the bank that the cherry on the ridge must already have gone. The original gives no fresh headnote.
Fujiwara no Ietaka was one of the compilers of the Shin Kokin Wakashu; this is his third appearance in this book, after the hundred and thirteenth and hundred and thirty-ninth poems.
The time is the end of spring; the place is the Yoshino River in Yamato Province and the ridge above it.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
The first two lines fix place and object. Kerria is a flower of the waterside, and pairing it with a riverbank is an old convention.
An exclamatory auxiliary in the third line marks the recognition that it has opened.
The fourth line lifts the eye from the bank to the ridge, so that low and high, kerria and cherry, are set against each other.
A perfect auxiliary and one of present conjecture close the poem: they must have fallen. The ridge is not in view, and the state of its cherries is reasoned out from the flowering at hand. It is the pattern of the second, twenty-sixth and ninety-first poems in Book One, moving from a visible sign to an unseen fact.
Standing at the turn from the cherry run to the kerria, the poem holds the change of season within a single piece.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Ietaka
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- On Hatsuse hill the spring has darkened away with the fading bloom and the cloud they were mixed with is lingering on the summit
- I halt my horse here to water it once again where the kerria lets its dew fall on the stream the Tamagawa at Ide
- Over the bare rock the Kiyotaki runs fast and so the water breaks and folds the branches back the kerria at the bank