Ika nareba sono Kamiyama no aoigusa toshi wa furedomo futaba naruramu

English Translation

How can it be so
that the hollyhock that grows
on that hill of gods
has passed year upon year through
and still bears but its two leaves

Meaning

How is it that the hollyhock on that hill of the gods, old as it is, still has only its two leaves?

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 183

Headnote: composed on the hollyhock.
The second poem connected with the Kamo festival, wondering that the hollyhock on the sacred hill should keep only two leaves however many years pass. The headnote gives the plant as the topic.
Kojiju was a lady-in-waiting and poet of the late Heian period; her dates are not recorded. She is said to have been called by a name recalling a poem of hers on waiting through a night.
The time is the season of the festival; the place is Kamiyama in Yamashiro Province, the hill above the Kamo shrine on which the god was held to have descended.
The occasion was the set topic.

The first line opens the poem with a question: how does it come about?
The demonstrative in the second line carries the sense of long ago as well as pointing to the place name it introduces, so that the hill is at once that hill and the hill of old.
The third line names the plant used at the festival.
The concessive particle in the fourth line means: though the years go by.
The auxiliary at the close expresses present conjecture and answers to the question in the first line. The plant's habit of keeping two leaves is set against a long stretch of years. Poems on things that do not change run through this anthology, as in Shunzei's sixteenth poem in Book One on aged pines and the hundred and sixty-sixth in Book Two on an evergreen; here the unchangingness is offered as a puzzle.

Author

Kojiju

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other