柴の戸にさすや日影の名残なく
春暮れかかる山の端の雲
春暮れかかる山の端の雲
- Roma-ji
-
Shiba no to ni sasu ya hikage no nagori naku haru kurekakaru yama no ha no kumo
- English Translation
-
On the brushwood door
the light of the sun that shone
is gone without trace
and the spring is going down
in cloud at the mountain's edge
- Meaning
- The sunlight on the brushwood door is gone without a trace, and the spring is going down into the cloud along the ridge.
- Commentary
-
Book Two Spring Poems II 173
Headnote: on the theme of the end of spring at a mountain house.
The seventh poem grieving over the end of spring. The topic is late spring seen from a house in the hills, and the poem lays the fall of night over the close of the season.
Kunaikyo was a lady-in-waiting to Retired Emperor Go-Toba and died young. This is her third appearance in this book, after the hundred and twenty-eighth and hundred and twenty-ninth poems.
The time is the evening of the last day of spring; the place is a rough dwelling in the hills.
The occasion was the set topic.
The word in the first line names a door woven of brushwood, the mark of a mountain dwelling. It stands where the pine-wood door stood in Princess Shokushi's third poem in Book One.
The verb in the second line means for sunlight to fall, and it also carries the sound of the verb for closing a door, so that shining and shutting coincide, an ambiguity well suited to the moment when the light goes. The particle after it is exclamatory.
The third line means without any trace left. Masatsune's hundred and forty-fifth poem asked that a trace be kept; this one states flatly that none remains.
The fourth line means that the spring is on the point of ending. The close of a day and the close of a season are held in a single verb.
The poem closes on a noun: in the quarter where the sun has gone, only cloud is left. Princess Shokushi's third poem in Book One set snowmelt at the door of a mountain hut to mark the beginning of spring; this one sets the fading of light at a mountain door to mark its end, and the two stand as a pair.
- Author
- Kunaikyo
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- 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
- Though I know it well that saying wait will not hold anything at all still, past all reason, I grieve at parting from the springtime
- From tomorrow on who will come, even seldom to the flower fields of Shiga, and pay a call on this old home of the spring
- The spring has gone by and it seems summer has come for the white robes are spread to dry there, so they say on heavenly Kaguyama