U no hana no sakinuru toki wa shirotae no nami mote yueru kakine to zo miru

English Translation

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

Meaning

When the deutzia opens, I see a hedge that has been plaited out of white waves.

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 181

Headnote: topic unknown.
The second poem on deutzia. Where the previous poem saw moonlight, this one sees white waves; two poems liken the same flower to two different white things and are placed together. The headnote gives no topic and nothing is known of the circumstances.
The poet, given by his court title, is Fujiwara no Shigeie (1128-1180), a son of Fujiwara no Akisuke and a member of the Rokujo house. Akisuke, poet of the hundred and twenty-fourth poem in Book Two, was his father, and Kiyosuke of the thirty-fourth poem in Book One his elder brother.
The time is early summer; the place is a hedge where deutzia is in flower.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.

A perfect auxiliary in the attributive form closes the second line: when it has opened.
The third line names a white cloth and reaches down to the waves below. It is the word used in the opening poem of this book, and it recurs through the summer poems wherever whiteness is meant.
The fourth line means plaited with, using the verb for binding up a hedge. To have a hedge woven of white waves gives the water a craftsman's hands, as in Sutoku's seventy-first poem in Book One, where waves wove the willows.
An emphatic particle governs the same attributive verb that closed the previous poem, so that the two share an ending. Seeing flowers as white waves is also the device of the hundred and thirty-second poem in Book Two, used there of cherry, and it returns here in another season.

Author

Fujiwara no Shigeie

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other