Hototogisu nakitsutsu izuru ashihiki no yamatonadeshiko sakinikerashi mo

English Translation

Calling as it comes
out of the mountains, and so
in the wooded hills
the pinks of Yamato must
have come into bloom, it seems

Meaning

The cuckoo comes calling down out of the hills: the pinks up there must have opened.

Commentary

Book Three Summer Poems 196

Headnote: as in the preceding poem, topic unknown.
From the cuckoo's voice the poet infers that the pinks have opened in the hills. The original gives no fresh headnote.
The poet, given by his court title, is Onakatomi no Yoshinobu (921-991). He served as chief priest of the Ise Shrine, is counted among the thirty-six immortals of poetry, and took part in compiling the Gosen Wakashu.
The time is summer; the place is the hills the bird comes down from.
The occasion of composition is not recorded.

A continuative particle in the first line keeps the bird calling as it comes down, the idea of the hundred and ninety-second poem.
The third line is a pillow word attaching to the word for mountain. In the hundred and sixty-second poem of Book Two it was carried over to the name of a flower; here it takes its proper word.
The fourth line folds the word for mountain into the name of the flower, so that one sound serves both the hills and the old name of the country. The pink flowers from summer into autumn.
The auxiliary at the close is a contraction expressing inference from evidence, the same form as in the opening poem of this book; there the evidence was drying robes, here it is a bird's voice. The final particle is exclamatory.
From the fact that the bird has come down, the state of the flowers up in the hills is reasoned out: the pattern of the hundred and fifty-eighth and hundred and sixty-first poems, moving from a visible sign to an unseen fact.

Author

Onakatomi no Yoshinobu

Source

Shin Kokin Wakashu

Other