Kurenu to wa omou mono kara fujinami no sakeru yado ni wa haru zo hisashiki

English Translation

Though the spring is gone
or so I had been thinking
at a house where blooms
the wisteria, the spring
is a long time in going

Meaning

I had thought the spring was over; and yet at a house where the wisteria blooms, the spring goes on and on.

Commentary

Book Two Spring Poems II 165

Headnote: for a screen at the residence of the Seishin Duke.
The third poem in the run on wisteria. So long as the wisteria is in flower, the poem holds, spring has not ended, and the season is stretched out. The Seishin Duke of the headnote is the posthumous title of the Chancellor Fujiwara no Saneyori, the same man named in the headnote to the hundred and fiftieth poem.
Ki no Tsurayuki compiled the Kokin Wakashu and wrote its Japanese preface. This is his third appearance in this book, after the hundred and eighth and hundred and eleventh poems.
The time is the end of spring; the place is a house with wisteria, shown on a screen.
The occasion was composition for a screen.

The construction closing the second line is concessive: though I think so. The knowledge that spring is over by the calendar is set down first.
The third line gives the grounds for the turn. Wisteria flowers from the end of spring into early summer, later than the cherry.
The fourth line limits the claim to a particular house, so that time runs differently there.
An emphatic particle governs the attributive form at the close: the spring lasts long. The gap between the calendar and what is felt is accounted for by the presence of flowers. As in Shunzei's fifth poem in Book One, which had taken spring for the capital's alone, an idea about the season is corrected by an actual scene.

Author

Ki no Tsurayuki

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other