Kakute koso mimaku hoshikere yorozuyo o kakete nioeru fujinami no hana

English Translation

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

Meaning

Just as they are now, I would go on looking at them: wisteria blooming through ten thousand ages.

Commentary

Book Two Spring Poems II 163

Headnote: at a banquet for the wisteria flowers at the Hikyosha.
A run on wisteria begins here. The Hikyosha of the headnote was one of the palace halls, also called the Wisteria Court from the vines planted in its garden. The poem was written at a banquet held there.
The poet is given by the era name Engi, that of Emperor Daigo's reign, and the poem is therefore his. The headnotes to the fourteenth and sixty-eighth poems of Book One refer to the same reign.
The time is the end of spring; the place is the Hikyosha in the palace.
The occasion was the wisteria banquet.

The first line means: just so, as it is now. An emphatic particle governs the concessive form at the end of the second line.
The phrase in the second line means to wish to see, an old construction in which an auxiliary is turned into a noun by a suffix. It is the same form as in the hundred and tenth poem of this book and the hundred and sixty-fourth.
The third and fourth lines mean blooming across ten thousand ages, with a verb of extension over that span. The wish proper to a banquet is folded in.
The poem closes on a noun. The word for wisteria names the hanging clusters as waves. After a run of poems grieving over flowers that fall, wisteria is set down as something lasting, and the subject turns.

Author

Emperor Daigo

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other