Oshimedomo tomaranu haru mo aru mono o iwanu ni kitaru natsugoromo kana

English Translation

Though we grieve for it
there is a spring that will not
stay for our asking
and, never asked, it has come
the summer robe, and is worn

Meaning

There is a spring that will not stay however we grieve; and here, unasked, is the summer robe, come and already on my back.

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 176

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
A run on the changing of clothes at the start of summer begins here. This poem sets a spring that cannot be held against a summer robe that comes unbidden. The original gives no fresh headnote.
The Monk Sosei was a son of Archbishop Henjo and an early Heian poet, counted among the thirty-six immortals of poetry.
The time is the first day of the fourth month, when clothes were changed; no place is given.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.
Clothes were changed on the first day of the fourth and tenth months, and the observance was written of as the mark of summer's beginning.

The first line means: grieve as we may. Go-Shirakawa's hundred and forty-sixth poem in Book Two opens the same way, and the phrase belongs to the grieving over a departing spring.
The second line names a spring that will not stay, the idea of the hundred and seventy-second poem in Book Two, which knew that telling it to wait would not hold it.
The particle in the third line is concessive and exclamatory: and yet it is so.
The fourth line means: it came without being asked. The verb for coming also carries the sound of putting on a garment, and so runs into the robe of the final line. A spring that goes though it is begged to stay and a summer that comes though no one calls it are set against each other here.
The poem closes on a noun with an exclamatory particle. That the seasons change without regard to human wishes is stated through an object near at hand, a change of clothes.

Author

Sosei Hoshi

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other