暮れてゆく春の湊は知らねども
霞に落つる宇治の柴舟
霞に落つる宇治の柴舟
- Roma-ji
-
Kurete yuku haru no minato wa shiranedomo kasumi ni otsuru Uji no shibafune
- English Translation
-
Where the harbour lies
of the spring that darkens down
nobody can say
and into the haze it drops
a brushwood boat on Uji
- Meaning
- No one knows to what harbour the darkening spring is bound; and a brushwood boat drops down the Uji into the haze.
- Commentary
-
Book Two Spring Poems II 169
Headnote: from the time when he presented a fifty-poem sequence.
The third poem grieving over the end of spring. The season is seen as a boat and its destination asked after. The headnote assigns it to a fifty-poem sequence.
The Monk Jakuren was a nephew and adopted son of Fujiwara no Shunzei and later took orders. He was appointed one of the compilers of the Shin Kokin Wakashu but died before it was finished. This is his third appearance in this book, after the hundred and fifty-fourth and hundred and fifty-fifth poems.
The time is the end of spring; the place is the Uji River in Yamashiro Province.
The occasion was the presentation of the fifty poems.
The model is a poem in the Kokin Wakashu asking whether the Tatsuta River, which carries the maple leaves away each year, is the harbour where autumn comes to rest.
The first line means darkening, drawing to its end; the added verb of motion marks it as still in progress.
The second line discloses the conceit, the season as a vessel. The model asked after autumn's mooring; this asks after spring's, an allusion with the season exchanged.
The concessive particle in the third line turns the sentence: though no one knows. A question with no answer is put, and the poem moves to what is in front of it.
The verb in the fourth line means to run downstream, and the haze is the sign of spring, into which the boat disappears.
The poem closes on a noun, a boat laden with brushwood. An abstract question about where the season goes is replaced by one boat vanishing into haze. No answer is offered; only the disappearing shape is left.
- Author
- The Monk Jakuren
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- Is there any bloom left unfallen? Let us go in a company and look for it where it hides deep in the folds of the hills
- Under the branches my dwelling will fall to waste from this time onward for when the spring has gone by who will come to visit me
- Even unarrived for the flowers' sake I found myself awaiting them; and now the spring is gone here in this deep mountain place
- At Furu the field of early rice is turned back over on itself and I cannot turn my grief at the ending of the spring