あしひきの山吹の花散りにけり
井手のかはづは今や鳴くらん
井手のかはづは今や鳴くらん
- Roma-ji
-
Ashihiki no yamabuki no hana chirinikeri Ide no kawazu wa ima ya nakuramu
- English Translation
-
On the mountain slope
the kerria's flower has gone
and has fallen now
and at Ide are the frogs
beginning to cry by now
- Meaning
- The kerria has fallen; and at Ide, are the frogs beginning to call about now?
- Commentary
-
Book Two Spring Poems II 162
Headnote: a poem for the contest at the Teiji Palace in 913.
The fifth poem in the run on kerria, and its close. Where the previous poem guessed at the flowering, this one guesses at the frogs after the fall, so that two poems divide one form between opening and falling. The Teiji Palace of the headnote was the residence of Emperor Uda.
Fujiwara no Okikaze was an early Heian poet, counted among the thirty-six immortals of poetry.
The time is the end of spring; the place is Ide in Yamashiro Province, the ground of the hundred and fifty-ninth poem, so that Ide appears twice within the run.
The occasion was submission to the contest.
The first line is a pillow word properly attaching to the word for mountain, used here with the name of the flower, which begins with that word.
An exclamatory auxiliary in the third line marks the recognition that they have fallen: the fact at hand is set down first.
With the fourth line the thought turns to frogs in a distant place. Ide was widely known for having both the flowers and the frogs.
An interrogative particle and an auxiliary of present conjecture close the poem: are they calling by now? It is the form of the previous poem, and the two are placed together.
The fall of the kerria at hand is the evidence for a guess about what is happening at Ide. Thinking of the present state of an unseen place is also the method of Ietaka's hundred and fifty-eighth poem.
- Author
- Fujiwara no Okikaze
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- Over the bare rock the Kiyotaki runs fast and so the water breaks and folds the branches back the kerria at the bank
- Where the frogs are loud in the river Kannabi a shadow appears and is it opening now the flower of the kerria
- Just so, and no more is how I would have it seen for ten thousand years they hang and glow above us these wisteria flowers
- Seated in a ring we look and are not sated and to rise and go from the wisteria's waves is hard on a day like this