Asu yori wa Shiga no hanazono mare ni dani tare ka wa towamu haru no furusato

English Translation

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

Meaning

From tomorrow, who will come to the flower garden at Shiga, even now and then? This is spring's old home, and spring has gone.

Commentary

Book Two Spring Poems II 174

Headnote: from the time when he presented a hundred-poem sequence.
This poem closes Book Two, Spring Poems II. On the last day of spring the poet thinks of a flower garden that no one will visit from tomorrow. The headnote refers to the Shoji sequences of 1200.
The poet, given as Regent and Chancellor, is Fujiwara no Yoshitsune, author of the Japanese preface to the Shin Kokin Wakashu and of the poem that opens Book One. This is his fourth appearance in this book, after the hundred and thirty-sixth, hundred and forty-seventh and hundred and fifty-seventh poems.
The time is the last day of spring; the place is Shiga in Omi Province, the site of the Otsu capital and long written of as an old seat of government. It is the ground of Shunzei's sixteenth poem in Book One, on the shore pines of Shiga.
The occasion was the presentation of the hundred-poem sequence.
With Yoshitsune's poem placed last, the spring books of the anthology open and close with the same poet.

The first line means: beginning tomorrow, and in that one phrase tells us that today is the last day of spring.
The second line fixes the place: a flower garden in an old capital, so that a season past its height and a place past its own are laid together.
The third line means even occasionally. The particle means at least, if nothing more, and is used in the hundred and thirty-fourth, hundred and thirty-fifth and hundred and forty-fourth poems of this book.
The construction in the fourth line is rhetorical: who will come? No one will. The subject of callers ceasing once the flowers are gone, running through the hundred and twenty-fifth, hundred and sixty-eighth and hundred and seventieth poems, stands here as the close of the whole book.
The poem ends on a noun. The word for an old village recurs through the spring poems of this anthology: the opening poem of Book One called Yoshino a village where time had passed, and the hundred and forty-seventh of this book called Yoshino the old home of the flowers. Two books that began with spring arriving at an old village end with an old village the spring has left.

Author

Fujiwara no Yoshitsune

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other