Haru sugite natsu kinikerashi shirotae no koromo hosu chō ama no kaguyama

English Translation

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

Meaning

Spring is over and summer has come, it seems: they say the white robes are spread to dry on Ama-no-Kaguyama.

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 175

Headnote: topic unknown.
This poem opens Book Three, the summer poems. Following the spring section, a poem announcing the turn of the season is set first. The headnote gives no topic and nothing is known of the circumstances.
Empress Jito (645-702) was a daughter of Emperor Tenji and consort of Emperor Tenmu. She came to the throne after his death and moved the capital to Fujiwara.
The time is the beginning of summer; the place is Ama-no-Kaguyama in Yamato Province, in what is now Kashihara in Nara Prefecture, one of the three mountains of Yamato with Unebi and Miminashi.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
The poem is preserved in Book One of the Man'yoshu as an imperial composition by Jito. The Shin Kokin Wakashu takes it with two alterations, to the auxiliary of arrival and to the phrase about the drying robes.

The first line marks the turn of the season, taking up the close of Book Two, which ended by asking after a village the spring had left.
The second line contracts a perfect auxiliary with one of inference. That inference rests on evidence, and the evidence is the robes of the fourth line. The same form appears in Go-Toba's second poem in Book One, where mist trailing over the same mountain was the evidence for spring; one mountain thus serves for the arrival of both seasons in the same construction.
The third line names a white cloth and reaches down to the robes below.
The construction in the fourth line is a contraction meaning that so it is said. Nothing is actually seen; the matter is reported. Where the Man'yoshu original states the robes as spread and visible, this version turns it into hearsay.
The poem closes on a noun. A single sign, a white robe, is enough to declare the season, as haze was enough to declare spring at the opening of Book One.

Author

Empress Jito

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other