折節も移れば変へつ世の中の
人の心の花染めの袖
人の心の花染めの袖
- Roma-ji
-
Orifushi mo utsureba kaetsu yo no naka no hito no kokoro no hanazome no sode
- English Translation
-
As the season turns
so it has been changed as well
in this world of ours
the sleeve dyed with the flowers
that is the heart of people
- Meaning
- The season turned and the robe was changed; and the hearts of people in this world are sleeves dyed with flowers, that will not hold their colour.
- Commentary
-
Book Three Summer Poems 179
Headnote: composed as a poem on the beginning of summer.
This poem closes the run on the change of clothes, turning from the observance to the changeableness of the human heart. The headnote gives the beginning of summer as the occasion.
The poet, known as the daughter of Shunzei, was in fact his granddaughter and adopted daughter. In Book One she is the poet of the forty-seventh poem and in Book Two of the hundred and twelfth, hundred and fortieth and hundred and seventy-first.
The time is the first day of the fourth month; no place is given.
The occasion was the composition of a poem for the opening of summer.
The first line names the season, with a particle carrying the sense of the season too.
The verb in the second line means both that time passes and that colour fades; the phrase after it, with a perfect auxiliary, says that the robe has been changed. The plain fact is given first: when the season turns, one changes one's clothes.
With the third and fourth lines the poem moves from the robe to the heart.
The poem closes on a noun. The dye named there was made from spikenard and other flowers, beautiful and quick to fade, and human hearts are said to change in the same way.
Though written for the observance, the lower lines turn to a comment on people. The hundred and seventy-seventh poem still looked back to spring; this one takes the human heart rather than the season for its subject, and closes the run by carrying the nature of the object over to the mind.
- Author
- The Daughter of Fujiwara no Shunzei
- Source
- Shin Kokin Wakashu
- Other
-
- They have fallen all and no shade of flowers now under the branches and it is easy to leave in this summer robe of mine
- In my summer robe how many days have I passed since I put it on for the flowers left behind are falling again today
- The deutzia blooms here and there along the hedge in scattered clusters and I take the hedge itself for moonlight between the clouds
- When the deutzia has opened along the hedge I look and I see a fence that has been woven of white waves, and nothing else