Madoi shite miredomo akanu fujinami no tatamaku oshiki kyō ni mo aru kana

English Translation

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

Meaning

Sitting together in a circle we look and are not satisfied: today it is hard to rise and leave the waves of wisteria.

Commentary

Book Two Spring Poems II 164

Headnote: on the fourteenth day of the third month of 950, when he went to the Wisteria Court and grieved over the flowers.
The second poem in the run on wisteria. The headnote records an imperial visit to the Wisteria Court on that day to grieve over the blossom. It is the same hall as in the previous poem, so that two pieces share a setting.
The poet is given by the era name Tenryaku, that of Emperor Murakami's reign, and the poem is therefore his. The headnote to the twelfth poem of Book One refers to the same reign. Emperor Daigo, the poet of the previous piece, was his father.
The time is the fourteenth day of the third month, the end of spring; the place is the Wisteria Court in the palace.
The occasion was the banquet there.

The word in the first line means sitting together in a circle, and gives the scene of the banquet.
The verb in the second line means not to be satisfied, not to have one's fill. It occurs in the ninety-ninth, hundred and fifth and hundred and ninth poems, running through this book from its opening.
The third line names the object.
The phrase in the fourth line means the rising and going away, formed with the old nominalising suffix used in the previous poem. The verb for rising also belongs with the waves of the word for wisteria, so that leaving the seat and the rising of waves are laid together.
The poem closes on an exclamatory particle. As in Narihira's hundred and fifth poem, which found no evening like this one, the day is treated as one for which nothing can be substituted.

Author

Emperor Murakami

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other